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TWO WAR YEARS IN 
CONSTANTINOPLE 



TWO WAR YEARS 

IN 

CONSTANTINOPLE 

Sketches of German and Young Turkish 
Ethics and Politics 

BY 

DR. HARRY STUERMER 

lATE CORRESPONDENT OF THE KOLNISCHE ZEITUNQ 
IN CONSTANTINOPLE (1915-16) 



TBANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 

E. ALLEN 

AND THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



H 



.S8S 



COPYEIGHT, 1917, BY 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



DEC 3i 1917 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



©GI.A481187 



DECLARATION 

The undersigned hereby declares on his 
sworn word of honour that in writing this 
volume he has been in no way inspired by 
outside influence, and that he has never had 
any dealings whatsoever, material or other- 
wise, either before or during the war, with 
any Government, organisation, propaganda, 
or personality hostile to Germany or Turkey 
or even of a neutral character. His conscience 
alone has urged him to write and publish his 
impressions, and he hopes that by so doing he 
may perform a service towards the cause of 
truth and civilisation. 

Moreover, he can give formal assurance that 
he has expressly avoided making the acquaint- 
ance of any person resident in Switzerland un- 
til his manuscript should have been sent to 
press. 

Furthermore, he has been actuated by no 
personal motives in thus giving public expres- 
sion to his experiences and opinions, for he has 



VI 

no 



DECLARATION 

personal grievance, either material or moral, 
against any person whatsoever. 



Oeneva, 

Jum 1917. 



PREFACE 

While the author of this work was waiting 
on the frontier of Switzerland for final permis- 
sion from the German authorities to enter that 
country, Germany committed her second great 
crime, her first having completely missed its 
mark. She had begun to realise that she was 
beaten in the great conflict which she had so 
wantonly provoked with that characteristic 
over confidence in the power of her own mili- 
tarism and disdainful undervaluation of the 
morale and general capacities of her enemies. 
In final renunciation of any last remnants of 
humanity in her methods, she was now making 
a dying effort to help her already lost cause 
by a ruthless extension of her policy of piracy 
at sea and a gratification of all her brutal in- 
stincts in complete violation of the rights of 
neutral countries. 

It is therefore with all the more inward con- 
viction, with all the more urgent moral persua- 
sion, that the author makes use of the rare op- 

vii 



VIU 



PREFACE 



portunity offered him by residence in Switzer- 
land to range himself boldly on the side of 
truth and show that there are still Germans 
who find it impossible to condone even tacitly 
the moral transgression and political stupidity 
of their own and an allied Government. That 
is the sole purpose of this publication. 

Regardless of the consequences, he holds it 
to be his duty and his privilege, just because he 
is a German, to make a frank statement, from 
the point of view of human civilisation, of what 
have become his convictions from personal ob- 
servations made in the course of six months of 
actual warfare and practically two years of 
subsequent journalistic activity. He spent the 
time from Spring 1915 to Christmas 1916 in 
Turkey, and will of course only deal with what 
he knows from personal observation. The fol- 
lowing essays are of the nature merely of 
sketches and make no claim whatever to com- 
pleteness. 

With regard to purely German politics and 
ethics, therefore, the author will confine him- 
self to a few indications and impressions of a 
personal kind, but he cannot forget the role 
Germany has played in Turkey as an ally of 



PREFACE ix 

the present Young Turkish Government, nor 
can he ignore Germany's responsibility for the 
atrocities committed by them. The author 
pubhshes his impressions with a perfectly clear 
conscience, secure in the conviction that as the 
representative of a German paper he never 
once wrote a single word in favour of this 
criminal war, and that during his stay of more 
than twenty months in Turkey he never con- 
cealed his true opinions as soon as he had defi- 
nitely made up his mind what these were. 

On the contrary, he was rather dangerously 
candid and frank in speaking to anyone who 
wanted to listen to him — so much so, that it is 
almost a miracle that he ever reached a neutral 
country. After the war he will be in a position 
to appeal to the testimony of dozens of people 
of high standing in all walks of life that in both 
thought and action a deep cleft has always 
divided him from his colleagues, and that he 
has ever ardently longed for the moment when 
he might, freely and without fear of conse- 
quences, do his bit towards the enlightenment 
of the civilised world. 

May these lines, written in all sincerity and 
hereby submitted to the tribunal of public 



X PREFACE 

opinion, free the author at last from the burden 
of silent reproach heaped on him by a muti- 
lated, outraged, languishing humanity, of be- 
ing a German among thousands of Germans 
who desired this war. 

• • • • • 

Several months have passed since the orig- 
inal text of the German and French editions 
of this little book was written. Baghdad was 
taken by British troops before the last 
chapter of the German manuscript had been 
completed, and since then military operations 
have been more and more in favour of the 
Entente. A number of important political 
events have occurred, such as the Russian Rev- 
olution and the entry of the United States of 
America into the war. 

Further developments of Russian politics 
may yet have a direct effect on the final 
solution of the problems surrounding the de- 
feated Ottoman Empire. But the author has 
preferred to maintain the original text of his 
book, written early in March this year, and to 
make no changes whatever in the conclusions 
he had then arrived at as a result of the fresh 
impressions he carried away from Turkey. 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

At the outbreak of war in Germany — ^The German "world- 
politicians" (Weltpolitiker) — German and English men- 
tahty — ^The "place in the sun" — ^England's declaration 
of war — German methods in Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine 
— Prussian arrogance — Militaristic journalism .... 17 

CHAPTER II 

To Constantinople — ^Pro-Turkish considerations — The dilemma 
of a Gallipoli correspondent — Under German military 
control 35 

CHAPTER III 

The great Armenian persecutions — ^The system of Talaat and 
Enver — ^A denunciation of Germany as a cowardly and 
conscienceless accomplice 42 

CHAPTER IV 

The tide of war — ^Enver's oflFensive for the "liberation of the 
Caucasus" — ^The Dardanelles Campaign; the fate of Con- 
stantinople twice hangs in the balance — ^Nervous tension 
in international Pera — Bulgaria's attitude — ^Turkish ran- 
cour against her former enemy — German illusions of a 
separate peace with Russia — ^King Ferdinand's time- 
serving — ^Lack of munitions in the Dardanelles — A mys- 



xii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

terious death: a political murder? — ^The evacuation of 
Gallipoli — The Turkish version of victory — Constantinople 
unreleased — Kut-el-Amara — Propaganda for the "Holy 
War" — A prisoner of repute — Loyalty of Anglo-Indian 
officers — ^Turkish communiques and their worth — The fall 
of Erzerum — Official lies — ^The treatment of prisoners — 
Political speculation with prisoners of war — ^Treatment 
of enemy subjects — Stagnation and lassitude in the sum- 
mer of 1916 — The Greeks in Turkey — Dread of Greek 
massacres — Rumania's entry — Terrible disappointment — 
The three phases of the war for Turkey 75 

CHAPTER V 

The economic situation — Exaggerated Entente hopes — Hunger 
and suffering among the civil population — The system of 
requisitioning and the semi-official monopolists — Profiteer- 
ing on the part of the Government clique — Frivolity and 
cynicism — The "Djemiet" — The delegates of the German 
Zentraleinkaufsgesellschaft (Central Purchases Commis- 
sion) — A hard battle between German and Turkish in- 
trigue — Reform of the coinage — Paper money and its de- 
preciation — ^The hoarding of bullion — The Russian rouble 
the best investment 107 



CHAPTER VI 

German propaganda and ethics — The unsuccessful "Holy 
War" and the German Government — "The Holy War" 
a crime against civilisation, a chimera, a farce — Under- 
hand dealings — ^The German Embassy the dupe of adven- 
turers — ^The morality of German Press representatives — 
A trusty servant of the German Embassy — ^Fine official 
distinctions of morality — ^The German conception of the 
rights of individuals 126 



CONTENTS xiii 

CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

Young Turkish nationalism — One-sided abolition of capitula- 
tions — Anti-foreign efforts at emancipation — ^Abolition of 
foreign languages — German simplicity — ^The Turkification 
of commercial life — Unmistakable iutellectual improve- 
ment as a result of the war — ^Trade policy and customs 
tariff — National production — ^The founding of new busi- 
nesses in Turkey — Germany supplanted — German star- 
vation — Capitulations or full European control? — ^The 
colonisation and forcible Turkification of Anatolia — "The 
properties of people who have been despatched elsewhere" 
— The "Mohadjirs" — Greek persecutions just before the 
Great War — The "discovery" of Anatolia, the nucleus of 
the Ottoman Empire — Turkey finds herself at last — Ana- 
tolian dirt and decay — ^The "Greater Turkey" and the 
purely Turkish Turkey — Cleavage or concentration? . 151 

CHAPTER VIII 

Religion and race — ^The Islam policy of Abdul-Hamid and of 
the Young Turks — ^Turanism and Pan-Islamism as poHt- 
ical principles — ^Turanism and the Quadruple Alliance — 
Greed and race-fanaticism — Religious traditions and 
modem reforms — ^Reform in the law — A modem Sheikh- 
ul-Islam — ^Reform and nationalisation — ^The Armenian 
and Greek Patriarchates — The failure of Pan-Islamism — 
The alienation of the Arans — Djemal Pasha's "hangman's 
policy" in Syria — Djemal as a "Pro-French" — Djemal 
and Enver — Djemal and Germany — ^His true character — 
The attempts against the Suez Canal — Djemal's mur- 
derous work nears completion — The great Arabian and 
Syrian Separatist movement — The defection of the Emir 
of Mecca and the great Arabian catastrophe .... 176 



xiv CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 

PAGE 

Anti-war and pro-Entente feelings among the Turks — ^Turkish 
pessimism about the war — ^How would Abdul-Hamid have 
acted? — ^A war of prevention against Russia — ^Russia and 
a neutral Turkey — ^The agreement about the Dardanelles 
— ^A peaceful solution scorned — Alleged criminal inten- 
tions on the part of the Entente; the example of Greece 
and Salonika — ^To be or not to be? — German influence — 
Turkey stakes on the wrong card — ^The results . . . 209 

CHAPTER X 

The outlook for the future — ^The consequences of trusting 
Germany — The Entente's death sentence on Turkey — 
The social necessity for this deliverance — ^Anatolia, the 
new Turkey after the war; forecasts about the Turkish 
race — ^The Turkish element in the lost territory — ^Russia 
and Constantinople; international guarantees — Germany, 
at peace, benefits too — Farewell to the German "World 
Politicians" — German interests in a victorious and in a 
defeated Turkey — ^The German-Turkish treaty — ^A para- 
dise on earth — ^The Russian commercial impulse — ^The 
new Armenia Western Anatolia, the old Greek centre of 
civiUsation — Great Arabia and Syria — ^The reconciliation 
of Germany 258 

Appendix 283 



TWO WAR YEARS IN 
CONSTANTI NOPLE 



TWO WAR YEARS IN 
CONSTANTINOPLE 



CHAPTER I 

At the outbreak of war in Germany — The German 
"world-politicians" (Weltpolitiker) — German and 
English mentality — The "place in the smi" — Eng- 
land's declaration of war — German methods in Bel- 
gium and Alsace-Lorraine — Prussian arrogance — 
Militaristic j ournalism. 

Anyone who, like myself, set foot on German 
soil for the first time after years of sojourn 
in foreign lands, and more particularly in the 
colonies, just at the moment that Germany 
was mobilising for the great European war, 
must surely have been filled, as I was, with a 
certain feeling of melancholy, a slight uneasi- 
ness with regard to the state of mind of his 
fellow-countrymen as it showed itself in these 
dramatic days of August in conversations in 
the street, in cafes and restaurants, and in the 

17 



18 TWO WAR YEARS 

articles appearing in the Press. We Germans 
have never learnt to think soundly on political 
subjects. Bismarck's political heritage, al- 
though set forth in most popular form in his 
Thoughts and Recollections, a book that any- 
one opposing this war from the point of view 
rather of prudence than of ethics might utilise 
as an unending source of propaganda, has not 
descended to our rulers in any sort of living 
form. But an unbounded political naivete^ an 
incredible lack of judgment and of understand- 
ing of the point of view of other peoples, who 
have their raison d'etre just as much as we 
have, their vital interests, their standpoint of 
honour — have not prevented us from trying to 
carry on a grand system of Weltpolitik (world 
politics ) . The average everyday German has 
never really understood the English — either 
before or during the war ; in the latter's colonial 
policy, which, according to pan-German ideas, 
has no other aim than to snatch from us our 
"place in the sun"; in their conception of lib- 
erty and civilisation, which has entailed such 
mighty sacrifices for them on behalf of their 
Allies; when we trod Belgian neutrality un- 
derfoot and thought England would stand and 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 19 

look on; at the time of the debates about uni- 
versal service, when practically every German, 
even in the highest political circles, was ready 
to wager that there would be a revolution in 
England sooner than any general acceptance 
of Conscription; and coming down to more 
recent events, when the latest huge British war 
loan provided the only fit and proper answer 
to German frightfulness at sea. 

Let me here say a word on the subject of 
colonial policy, on which I may perhaps be 
allowed to speak with a certain amount of au- 
thority after extended travel in the farthest 
corners of Africa, and from an intimate, per- 
sonal knowledge of German as well as English 
and French colonies. Germany has less 
colonial territory than the older colonists, it is 
true. It is also true that the German struggle 
for the most widespread, the most intensive and 
lucrative employment of the energies and capa- 
bilities of our highly developed commercial 
land is justified. But at the risk of being 
dubbed as absolutely lacking in patriotism, I 
should like to point out that in the first place 
the resources we had at our disposal in our 
own colonial territory in tropical and sub-trop- 



20 TWO WAR YEARS 

ical Africa, little exploited as they then were, 
would have amply sufficed for our commercial 
needs and colonising capacities — though pos- 
sibly not for our aspirations after world power! 
And secondly, the very liberal character of 
England's trade and colonial policy did not 
hinder us in any way from reaching the top of 
the commercial tree even in foreign colonies. 

Anyone who knows English colonies knows 
that the British Government, wherever it has 
been possible to do so politically, that is, in 
all her colonies which are already properly or- 
ganised and firmly established as British, has 
always met in a most generous and sympathetic 
way German, and indeed any foreign, trade 
or other enterprises. New firms, with German 
capital, were received with open arms, their 
excellence and value for the young country 
heartily recognised and ungrudgingly encour- 
aged; not the slightest shadow of any jealousy 
of foreign undertakings could ever exist in a 
British colony, and every German could be as 
sure as an Englishman himself of being justly 
treated in every way and encouraged in the 
most generous fashion in his work. 

Thousands of Germans otherwise thorough- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 21 

ly ^ embued with the national spirit make 
no secret of the fact that they would far rather 
live in a British than a German colony. Too 
often in the latter the newcomer was met at 
every point by an exaggerated bureaucracy 
and made to feel by some official that he was 
not a reserve officer, and consequently a social 
inferior. Hints were dropped to discourage 
him, and inquiries were even made as to 
whether he had enough money to book his pass- 
age back to where he came from! 

Far be it from me to wish to depreciate by 
these words the value of our own colonial ef- 
forts. As pioneers in Africa we were working 
on the very best possible lines, but we should 
have been content to go on learning from the 
much superior British colonial methods, and 
should have finished and perfected our own do- 
main instead of always shouting jealously 
about other people's. I am quite convinced 
that another ten years of undisturbed peace- 
ful competition and Germany, with her own 
very considerable colonial possessions on the 
one hand, and the possibility on the other of 
pushing commercial enterprise on the highest 
scale not only in independent overseas states 



22 TWO WAR YEARS 

but under the beneficent protection of English 
rule with its true freedom and real furtherance 
of trade ''uplift," would have reached her goal 
much better than by means of all the sword- 
rattling Weltpolitik of the Pan-Germans. 

It is true that in territory not yet properly 
organised or guaranteed, politically still doubt- 
ful, and in quite new protectorates, especially 
along the routes to India, where vital English 
interests are at stake, and on the much-talked- 
of Persian Gulf, England could not, until her 
main object was firmly secured, meet in the 
same fair way German desires with regard to 
commercial activity. And there she has more 
than once learnt to her cost the true character 
of the German Weltpolitik. 

That is the real meaning, at any rate so far 
as colonial politics are concerned, of the Ger- 
man-English contest for a "place in the sun." 
No one who understands it aright could ever 
condone the outgrowths of our Weltpolitik^ 
however much he might desire to assist Ger- 
man ability to find practical outlet in all suit- 
able overseas territory, nor could he ever for- 
get the wealth of wonderful deeds, wrought in 
the service of human civilisation and freedom. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 23 

Englishmen can place to their credit years be- 
fore we ever began. With such considerations 
of justice in view, we should have recognised 
that there was a limit to our efforts after ex- 
pansion, and as a matter pf fact we should have 
gone further and fared better — in a decade 
we should have probably been really wealthy 
— for the English in their open-handed way 
certainly left us a surprising amount of room 
for the free exercise of our commercial talents. 

I have intentionally given an illustration 
only of the colonial side of the problem affect- 
ing German-English relations, so that I may 
avoid dealing with any subject I do not know 
from personal observation. 

It was this English people, that, in spite of 
all their egoism, have really done something 
for civilisation, that the German of August 
1914 accused of being nothing but a nation 
of shopkeepers with a cowardly, narrow- 
minded policy that was unprepared to make 
any sacrifice for others. It was this people 
that the German of August 1914 — and his 
spokesman von Bethmann-Hollweg, who later 
thought it necessary to defend himself against 
the charge of "having brought too much ethics 



24 TWO WAR YEARS 

into politics" — expected to stand by and see 
Belgium overridden. It was this same Eng- 
land that we believed would hold back even 
when the Chancellor found it impossible to 
apply to French colonial possessions the guar- 
antee he had given not to aim at any territorial 
conquests in the war with France! 

And so it was with all the more grimness, 
with all the more gravity, that on that mem- 
orable night of August 4th the terrible blow 
fell. The English declaration of war entered 
into the very soul of the German people, who 
stood as a sacrifice to a political miscalculation 
that had its roots less in a lack of thought and 
experience than in a boundless arrogance. 

About the same time I was a witness of those 
laughable scenes which took place on the Pots- 
damer Platz in Berlin, where, in complete mis- 
judgment of the whole political situation Japa- 
nese were carried shoulder high by the enthu- 
siastic and worthy citizens of Berlin under the 
erroneous impression that these obvious arch- 
enemies of Russia would naturally be allies of 
Germany. Every German that was not blind 
to the trend of true "world-politics" must 
surely have shaken his head over this lament- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 25 

able spectacle. A few days afterwards Japan 
sent its ultimatum against Kiao-Tchao ! 

It was the same incapability of thinking in 
terms of true world-politics that led us lately 
to believe that we might find supporters in 
Mexico and Japan of the piracy we indulged 
in as a result of America's intervention in the 
war, the same incapability that blinded us to 
the effect our methods must have on other neu- 
trals such as China and the South American 
States. And although one admits the possi- 
bility of a miscalculation being made, yet a mis- 
calculation with regard to England's attitude 
was not only the height of political stupidity, 
but showed an absence of moral sense. The 
moment England entered the war, Germany 
lost the war. 

And while the world-politicians of Berlin, 
having recovered from their first dismay, were 
making jokes about the ''nation of shopkeep- 
ers" and its little army which they would just 
"have arrested"; while a little later the mili- 
tary events up to St. Quentin and the Battle 
of the Marne seemed to justify the idle mock- 
ers who knew nothing of England and had 
never even ventured their noses out of Ger- 



26 TWO WAR YEARS 

many, — ^those who had lived in the colonies 
were uttering warnings against any kind of 
optimism, and some already felt the war would 
end badly for us. 

I belonged to the latter group. I expressed 
my conviction in this direction as early as Au- 
gust 6th, 1914, in a letter which I wrote from 
Berlin for my father's birthday. In it I main- 
tained that in spite of all our brilliant military 
successes, which would certainly not last, fhis 
war was a mistake and would assuredly end in 
failure for Germany. Littera scripta manet, 
Never from that moment have I believed in 
final victory for Germany. Slowly but surely 
then I veered round to the position that I could 
no longer even desire victory for Germany. 

Naturally I did my military duty. I saw 
the fearful crime Germany was committing, 
yet I hurried to the front with the millions 
who believed that Germany was innocent and 
had been attacked without cause. There was 
nothing else to be done, and it must of course 
be remembered that my final rupture with Ger- 
many did not take place all of a sudden. After 
a few months of war in Masuria I was re- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 27 

leased as unfit for active service as the result 
of a severe illness. 

Of all the many episodes of my life at the 
front, none is so deeply impressed on my mem- 
ory as the silent war of mutual hatred I waged 
with my immediately superior officer, a true 
prototype of his race, a true Prussian. I can 
still see him, a man of fifty-five or so, who, in 
spite of former active service, had only reached 
the rank of lieutenant, and who, as he told me 
himself right at the beginning, in very mis- 
placed confidence, rushed into active service 
again because in this way he could get really 
good pay and would even have a prospect of 
further promotion. 

This Lieutenant Stein told me too of the 
first weeks in Belgium, when he had been in 
command of a company, and I can still hear 
him boasting about his warlike propensities, 
and how his teacher had said about him when 
he was a boy "he was capable of stealing an 
altar-cloth and cutting it up to make breeches 
for himself." 

"When we wanted to do any commandeer- 
ing or to plunder a house," so he told me, 
"there was a very simple means. A man be- 



28 TWO WAR YEARS 

longing to my company would be ordered to 
throw a Belgian rifle through an open cellar 
window, the house would then be searched for 
weapons, and even if we found only one rifle 
we had orders to seize everything without 
mercy and to drive out the occupiers." I can 
still see the creature standing in front of me 
and relating this and many a similar tale in 
these first days before he knew me. I have 
never forgotten it ; and I think I owe much to 
Lieutenant Stein. He helped me on the way 
I was predestined to go, for had I not just re- 
turned from the colonies and foreign lands, 
imbued with liberal ideas, and from the first 
torn by grave doubts? 

The Lieutenant may be an exception — 
granted; but he is an exception unfortunately 
but too often represented in that army of mil- 
lions on its invading march into unhappy Bel- 
gium, among oflicers and non-commissioned of- 
ficers, whom, at any rate so far as active serv- 
ice is concerned, everyone who has served in 
the German Army will agree with me in call- 
ing on the average thoroughly brutal. Lieu- 
tenant Stein gave me my first real deep dis- 
gust of war. He is a type that I have not in- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 29 

vented, and he will easily be identified by the 
German military authorities from his signa- 
ture on my military pass as one of those arch- 
Prussians who suddenly readopt a martial air, 
suddenly revive and come into their element 
again, although they may be sickly old valetu- 
dinarians — the kind of men who in civil life 
are probably enthusiastic members of the "Ger- 
man Colonial Society," the "Naval Union," 
and the "Pan- German Association," and ar- 
dent world-politicians of the ale-bench type. 

I found his stories afterwards confirmed to 
the letter by one of the most famous German 
war-correspondents, Paul Schweder, the au- 
thor of the four-volume work entitled At Im- 
perial Headquarters, With a naivete equal to 
Lieutenant Stein's, and trusting no doubt to 
my then official position as correspondent of 
a German paper, he gave me descriptions of 
Belgian atrocities committed by our soldiers 
and the results of our system of occupation 
that, in all their horrible nakedness, put every- 
thing that ever appeared in the Entente news- 
papers absolutely in the shade. 

As early as the beginning of 1916 he told 
me the plain truth that we were practically 



30 TWO WAR YEARS 

starving Belgium and that the country was 
really only kept alive by the Relief Com- 
mission, and that we were attempting to ruin 
any Belgian industry which might compete 
with ours by a systematic removal of machinery 
to Germany. And that was before the time of 
the Deportations! 

Schweder's descriptions dealt for the most 
part with the sexual morality of our soldiers 
in the trenches. In spite of severe punish- 
ments, so he assured me, thousands and thou- 
sands of cases occurred of women and young 
girls out of decent Belgian and French fami- 
lies being outraged. The soldier on short 
leave from the front, with the prospect of a 
speedy return to the first-line trenches and 
death staring him in the face, did not care 
what happened; the unhappy victims were for 
the most part silent about their shame, so that 
the cases of punishment were very few and 
far between. 

While I was at the front I heard extraordi- 
nary things, for which I had again detailed con- 
firmation from Schweder, who knew the whole 
of the Western Front well, about the German 
policy of persecution in Alsace-Lorraine. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 31 

There the system was to punish with imprison- 
ment not only actions but opinions. The au- 
thorities did not even scruple to imprison girls 
out of highly-respected houses who had per- 
haps made some harmless remark in youthful 
ignorance, and shut them up with common 
criminals and prostitutes to work out their long 
sentence. Such scandalous acts, which are a 
disgrace to humanity, Paul Schweder con- 
firmed by the dozen or related at first-hand. 

He was intelligent enough, too, as was evi- 
dent from the many statements made by him 
in confidential circles, to see through the utter 
lack of foundation, the mendacity, the im- 
morality of what he wrote in his books merely 
for the sake of filthy lucre; but when I tried 
one day to take on a bet with him that Verdun 
would not fall, he took his revenge by spread- 
ing the report in Constantinople that I was an 
Pro-Entente, and doing his utmost to intrigue 
against me. That is the German war-corre- 
spondent's idea of morality! 

When I was released from the army in the 
beginning of 1915, I joined the editorial staff 
of the Kolnische Zeitung and remained for 
some weeks in Cologne. I have not retained 



32 TWO WAR YEARS 

any very special impressions of this period of 
my activity, except perhaps the recollection of 
the spirit of jingoistic Prussianism that I — 
being a Badener^ — had scarcely ever come 
across before in its full glory, and, from the 
many confidential communications and discus- 
sions among the editorial staff, the feeling that 
even then there was a certain nervousness and 
insecurity among those who, in their leading ar- 
ticles, informed the public daily of their abso- 
lute confidence in victory. 

One curious thing at this time, perhaps 
worthy of mention, was the disdainful con- 
tempt with which these Prussians — even be- 
fore the fall of Przemysl — regarded Austria. 
But the scornful and biting commentaries 
made behind the scenes in the editorial sanc- 
tum at the fall of this stronghold stood in 
most striking contrast to what the papers 
wrote about it. 

Later, when I had already been a long time 
in Turkey, a humorous incident gave me re- 
newed opportunity of seeing this Prussian 
spirit of unbounded exaggeration of self and 
depreciation of others. The incident is at the 
same time characteristic of the spirit of mili- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 33 

tarism with which the representatives of the 
German Press are thoroughly imbued, in spite 
of the opportunities most of them have had 
through long visits to other countries of gain- 
ing a little more savoir fcdre. 

One beautiful summer afternoon at a 
promenade concert in the "Petit Champs" at 
Pera I introduced an Austrian Lieutenant of 
Dragoons I knew, belonging to one of the best 
regiments, to our Balkan correspondent who 
happened to be staying in Constantinople: 
"Lieutenant N.; Herr von M." The corre- 
spondent sat down at the table and repeated 
very distinctly : ''Lieutenant-Colonel von Mf' 
It turned out that he had been a second lieu- 
tenant in the Prussian Army, and had pushed 
himself up to this wonderful rank in the Bul- 
garian Army, instinctively combining journal- 
ism and militarism. My companion, however, 
with true Austrian calm, took not the slightest 
notice of the correction, did not spring up and 
greet him with an enthusiastic "Ah! my dear 
fellow-officer, etc.," but began an ordinary so- 
cial conversation. 

Would anyone believe that next day old 
Herr von M. took me roundly to task for sit- 



34. TWO WAR YEARS 

ting at the same table as an Austrian officer 
and appearing in public with him, and in- 
formed me quasi-officially that as a represen- 
tative of the Kolnische Zeitung I should asso- 
ciate only with the German colony in Con- 
stantinople. 

I wonder which is the most irritating charac- 
teristic of this type of mind — its overbearing 
attitude towards our Allies, its jingoistic "Im- 
perial German" cant, or its wounded dignity 
as a militarist who forgets that he is a journal- 
ist and no longer an officer? 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 35 



CHAPTER II 

In Constantinople — Pro-Turkish considerations — The 
dilemma of a Gallipoli correspondent — Under Ger- 
man military control. 

A FEW days after the fall of Przemysl I set 
out for Constantinople. I left Germany with 
a good deal of friendly feeling towards the 
Turk. I was even quite well disposed to- 
wards the Young Turks, although I knew and 
appreciated the harm caused by their regime 
and the reproaches levelled against it since 
1909. At any rate, when I landed on Turkish 
soil I was certainly not lacking in goodwill 
towards the Government of Enver and Talaat, 
and nothing was further from my thoughts 
than to prejudice myself against my new 
sphere of work by any preconceived criticism. 
In comparison with Abdul-Hamid I re- 
garded the regime of the Young Turks, in 
spite of all, as a big step in advance and a 
necessary one, and the parting words of one 



36 TWO WAR YEARS 

of our old editors, a thorough connoisseur of 
Turkey, lingered in my ears without very much 
effect. He said: "You are going to Constanti- 
nople. You will soon be able to see for your- 
self the moral bankruptcy of the Young 
Turks, and you will find that Turkey is noth- 
ing but a dead body galvanised into action, 
that will only last as long as the war lasts and 
we Germans supply the galvanising power." 
I would not believe it, and went to Turkey 
with an absolutely open mind to form my own 
opinion. 

It must also be remembered that all the pro- 
Turkish utterances of Eastern experts of all 
shades and nationalities who emphasised the 
fact that the Turks were the most respectable 
nation of the East, were not without their ef- 
fect upon me; also I had read Pierre Loti. I 
was determined to extend to the Turkish Gov- 
ernment the strong sympathy I already felt for 
the Turkish people^ — and, let me here empha- 
sise it, still feel. To undermine that sympathy, 
to make me lose my confidence in this race, 
things would have to go badly indeed. They 
went worse than I ever thought was possible. 

I went first of all to the new Turkish front 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 37 

in the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula, 
where everything was ruled by militarism and 
there was but little opportunity to worry about 
politics. The combined attack by sea and 
land had just begun, and I passed the next 
few weeks on the Ariburnu front. I found 
myself in the entirely new position of war- 
correspondent. I had now to write profes- 
sionally about this war, which I detested with 
all my heart and soul. 

Well, I simply had to make the back fit the 
burden. Whatever I did or did not do, I have 
certainly the clear satisfaction of knowing 
that I never wrote a single word in praise of 
war. One will understand that, in spite of my 
inward conviction that Germany by unloosing 
the war on Europe had committed a terrible 
crime against humanity, in spite of my con- 
sciousness of acting in a wrong cause, in spite 
of my deep disgust of much that I had already 
seen, I was still interested in Turkey's fight 
for existence, but from quite another stand- 
point. 

As an objective onlooker I did not have to 
be an absolute hypocrite to do justice to my 
journalistic duties to my paper. I got to 



38 TWO WAR YEARS 

know the Turkish soldier with his stoical hero- 
ism in defence, and the brilliant attacking 
powers and courage of the Anatolians with 
their blind belief in their Padishah, as they 
were rushed to the defence of Stamboul and 
hurled themselves in a bayonet charge against 
the British machine-guns under a hail of shells 
from the sea. I gained a high opinion of Turk- 
ish valour and powers of resistance. I had 
no reason to stint my praise or withhold my 
judgment. In mess -tents and at various ob- 
servation-posts I made the personal acquaint- 
ance of crowds of thoroughly sympathetic and 
likeable Turkish officers. Let me mention but 
one — Essad Pasha, the defender of Jannina. 

I found quite enough material on my two 
visits to Gallipoli during various phases of the 
fighting to write a series of f euilletons without 
any glorification of militarism and political 
aims. I confined myself to what was of gen- 
eral human interest, to what was picturesque, 
what was dramatic in the struggle going on in 
this unique theatre of war. 

But even then I was beginning to have my 
own opinion about much that I saw; I was 
already torn by conflicting doubts. Already I 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 39 

was beginning to ask myself whether my sym- 
pathies would not gradually turn more and 
more definitely to those who were vainly storm- 
ing these strong Turkish forts from the sea, 
under a deadly machine-gun fire, for the cause 
of true civilisation, the cause of liberty, was 
manifestly on their side. 

I had opportunity, too, of making compari- 
sons from the dead and wounded and the few 
prisoners there were between the value of the 
himian material sacrificed on either side — on 
the one, brave but stupid Anatolians, accus- 
tomed to dirt and misery; on the other cultured 
and highly civilised men, sportsmen from the 
colonies who had hurried from the farthest 
corners of the earth to fight not only for the 
British cause, but for the cause of civilisation. 

But at that time I was not yet ripe for the 
decision forced upon me later by other things 
that I saw with my own eyes; I had not yet 
reached that deep inward conviction that I 
should have to make a break with Germany. 
The only thing I could do and felt compelled 
to do then was to pay my homage not only to 
Turkish patriotism and Turkish bravery, but 
to the wonderful courage and fearlessness of 



40 TWO WAR YEARS 

death shown by those whom at that time I 
had, as a German, to regard as my enemies; 
this I did over and over again in my articles. 

I saw, too, the first indications of other 
things. Traces of the most outspoken jingo- 
ism among Turkish officers became gradually 
apparent, and more than one Turkish com- 
mander pointed out to me with ironical em- 
phasis that things went just as smoothly and 
promptly in his sector, where there was no 
German officer in charge, as anywhere else. 

On my second visit to the Dardanelles, in 
summer, I heard of considerable quarrels over 
questions of rank, and there was more than 
one outbreak of jingoistic arrogance on the 
part of both Turkish and German subalterns, 
leading in some cases even to blows and con- 
sequent severe punishment for insubordination. 
The climax was reached in the scandal of sup- 
planting General Weber, commanding the 
"Southern Group" (Sedd-ul-Bahr) by Vehib 
Pasha, a grim and fanatical Turk. In this 
case the Turkish point of view prevailed, for 
General Liman von Sanders, Commander-in- 
Chief of the Gallipoli Army, was determined 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 41 

not to lose his post, and agreed slavishly with 
all that Enver Pasha ordained. 

From other fronts, such as the Irak and 
the "Caucasus" (which was becoming more 
and more a purely Armenian theatre of war, 
without losing that chimerical designation in 
the official reports!), there came even more 
significant tales; there German and Turkish 
officers seemed to live still more of a cat-and- 
dog life than in the Dardanelles. Of course 
under the iron disciphne of both Turks and 
Germans, these unpleasant occurrences were 
never allowed to come to such a pass that they 
would interfere in any way with military op- 
erations, but they were of significance as symp- 
toms of a deep distrust of the Germans even 
in Turkish military circles. 



42 TWO WAR YEARS 



CHAPTER III 

The great Armenian persecutions — The system of Ta- 
laat and Enver — A denunciation of Germany as a 
cowardly and conscienceless accomplice. 

In spite of all, I returned to Constantinople 
from my first visit to the Dardanelles with 
very little diminution of friendly feeling 
towards the Turks. My first experience when 
I returned to the capital was the beginning 
of the Armenian persecutions. And here I 
may as well say at once that my love for pres- 
ent-day Turkey perished absolutely with this 
unique example in the history of modern hu- 
man civilisation of the most appalling bestiality 
and misguided jingoism. This, more than 
everything else I saw on the German- Turkish 
side throughout the war, persuaded me to take 
up arms against my own people and to adopt 
the position I now hold. I say "German- 
Turkish," for I must hold the German Gov- 
ernment as equally responsible with the Turks 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 43 

for the atrocities they allowed them to commit. 

Here in neutral Switzerland, where so many 
of these unfortunate Armenians have taken 
refuge and such abundance of information is 
available, so much material has been collected 
that it is unnecessary for me to go into details 
in this book. Suffice it to say that the narra- 
tion of all the heart-rending occurrences that 
came to my personal knowledge during my 
stay in Turkey, without my even trying to col- 
lect systematic information on the subject, 
would fill a book. To my deep sorrow I have 
to admit that, from everything I have heard 
from reliable sources — from German Red 
Cross doctors, officials and employees of the 
Baghdad Railway, members of the American 
Embassy, and Turks themselves — ^although 
they are but individual cases — I cannot regard 
as exaggerated such appalling facts and re- 
ports as are contained for example in Arnold 
Toynbee's Armenian Atrocities,^ 

In this little book, however, which partakes 

^ This and other works on the sub j ect came to my no- 
tice for the first time a few days before going to press. 
Before that (in Turkey, Austria, and Germany) they 
were quite unprocurable. 



44 TWO WAR YEARS 

more of the nature of an essay than an exhaus- 
tive treatise, my task will be rather to deter- 
mine the system, the underlying political 
thought and the responsibility of Germany in 
all these horrors — ^massacres, the seduction of 
women, children left to die or thrown into the 
sea, pretty young girls carried off into houses 
of ill repute, the compulsory conversion to 
Islam and incorporation in Turkish harems 
of young women, the ejection from their homes 
of eminent and distinguished families by bru- 
tal gendarmes, attacks while on the march by 
paid bands of robbers and criminals, "emigra- 
tion" to notorious malaria swamps and barren 
desert and mountain lands, victims handed over 
to the wild lusts of roaming Bedouins and 
Kurds — in a word, the triumph of the basest 
brutality and most cold-blooded refinement of 
cruelty in a war of extermination in which half 
a million men, and according to some estimates 
many more, have perished, while the remain- 
ing one and a half million of this most intelli- 
gent and cultured race, one of the principal 
pioneers of progress in the Ottoman Empire, 
see nothing but complete extinction staring 
them in the face through the rupture of family 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 45 

ties, the deprivation of their rights, and eco- 
nomic ruin. 

The Armenian persecutions began in all 
their cruelty, practically unannounced, in 
April 1915. Certain events on the Caucasus 
front, which no number of lies could explain 
away, gave the Turkish Government the wel- 
come pretext for falling like wild animals on 
the Armenians of the eastern vilajets — the so- 
called Armenia Proper— and getting to work 
there without deference to man, woman, or 
child. This was called "the restoration of 
order in the war zone by military measures, 
rendered necessary by the connivance of the 
inhabitants with the enemy, treachery and 
armed support." The first two or three hun- 
dred thousand Armenians fell in the first 
rounding up. 

That in those outlying districts situated di- 
rectly on the Russian frontier a nimiber of 
Armenians threw in their lot with the advanc- 
ing Russians, no one will seek to deny, and 
not a single Armenian I have spoken to denies 
it. But the "Armenian Volunteer Corps" that 
fought on the side of Russia was composed for 
the most part — that at least has been proved 



46 TWO WAR YEARS 

beyond doubt — of Russian Armenians settled 
in Transcaucasian territory. 

So far as the Turkish Armenians taking 
part are concerned, no reasonable being would 
think of denying Turkey as Sovereign State 
the formal right of taking stringent measure 
against these traitors and deserters. But if I 
expressly recognise this right, I do so with 
the big reservation that the frightful suffer- 
ings undergone for centuries by a people left 
by their rulers to the mercy of marauding 
Kurds and oppressed by a government of 
shameless extortioners, absolutely absolve these 
deserters in the eyes of the whole civilised 
world from any moral crime. 

And yet I would willingly have gone so far 
for the benefit of the Turks, in spite of their 
terrible guilt towards this people, as perhaps 
to keep my own counsel on the subject, if it 
had merely been a case of the execution of 
some hundreds under martial law or the car- 
rying out of other measures — such as deporta- 
tion — against a couple of thousand Armenians 
and these strictly confined to men. It is even 
possible that Europe and America would have 
pardoned Turkey for taking even stronger 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 47 

steps in the nature of reprisals or measures of 
precaution against the male inhabitants of that 
part of Armenia Proper which was gradually 
becoming a war zone. But from the very be- 
ginning the persecutions were carried on 
against women and children as well as men, 
were extended to the hundred thousand inhabi- 
tants of the six eastern vilajets, and were char- 
acterised by such savage brutality that the 
methods of the slave-drivers of the African in- 
terior and the persecution of Christians under 
Nero are the only thing that can be compared 
with them. 

Every shred of justification for the Turkish 
Government in their attempt to establish this 
as an "evacuation necessary for miUtary pur- 
poses and for the prevention of unrest" en- 
tirely vanishes in face of such methods, and 
I do not believe that there is a single decent 
German, cognisant of the facts of the case, 
who is not filled with real disgust of the Young 
Turkish Government by such cold-blooded 
butchery of the inhabitants of whole districts 
and the deportation of others with the express 
purpose of letting them die en route. Any- 



48 TWO WAR YEARS 

one with human feelings, however pro-Turkish 
he may be politically, cannot think otherwise. 

This "evacuation necessary for military pur- 
poses" emptied Armenia Proper of men. How 
often have Turks themselves told me — I could 
mention names, but I will not expose my in- 
formants, who were on the whole decent ex- 
ceptions to the rule, to the wrath of Enver or 
Talaat — ^how often have they assured me that 
practically not a single Armenian is to be 
found in Armenia! And it is equally certain 
that scarcely one can be left alive of all that 
horde of deported men who escaped the first 
massacres and were hunted up hill and down 
dale in a state of starvation, exposed to at- 
tacks by Kurds, decimated by spotted typhus, 
and finally abandoned to their fate in the 
scorching deserts of Northern Mesopotamia 
and Northern Syria. One has only to read the 
statistics of the population of the six vilajets 
of Armenia Proper to discover the hundreds 
of thousands of victims of this wholesale mur- 
der. 

But unfortunately that was not all. The 
Turkish Government went farther, much far- 
ther. They aimed at the whole Armenian 



IlSr CONSTANTINOPLE 49 

people, not only in Armenia itself, but also in 
the ''Diaspora," in Anatolia Proper and in the 
capital. They were at that time some hundred 
thousand. In this case they could scarcely go 
on the principle of "evacuation of the war 
zone," for the inhabitants were hundreds of 
miles both from the Eastern front and from 
the Dardanelles, so they had to resort to other 
measures. 

They suddenly and miraculously discovered 
a universal conspiracy among the Armenians 
of the Empire. It was only by a trick of this 
kind that they could succeed in carrying out 
their system of exterminating the entire Ar- 
menian race. The Turkish Government skil- 
fully influenced public opinion throughout the 
whole world, and then discovered, nay, ar- 
ranged for, local conspiracies. They then fal- 
sified all the details so that they might go on 
for months in peace and quiet with their cam- 
paign of extermination. 

In a series of semi-official articles in the 
newspapers of the Committee of Young Turks 
it was made quite clear that all Armenians were 
dangerous conspirators who, in order to shake 
off the Ottoman yoke, had collected firearms 



50 TWO WAR YEAKS 

and bombs and had arranged, with the help of 
EngHsh and Russian money, for a terrible 
slaughter of Turks on the day that the English 
fleet overcame the armies on the Dardanelles. 

I must here emphasise the fact that all the 
arguments the Turkish Government brought 
against the Armenians did not escape my no- 
tice. They were indeed evident enough in of- 
ficial and semi-official publications and in the 
writings of German "experts on Turkey." I 
investigated everything, even right at the be- 
ginning of my stay in Turkey, and always 
from a thoroughly pro-Turkish point of view. 
That did not prevent me however, from com- 
ing to my present point of view. 

Herr Zimmermann, the Secretary of State 
for Foreign Affairs, has only got to refer to 
the date of his letter to the editorial staff of 
my paper, in which he speaks of my confiden- 
tial report to the paper on this subject which 
went through his hands and aroused his inter- 
est, and he will find what opinions I held as 
early as the summer of 1916 on the subject 
of the Armenian persecutions — and this with- 
out my having any particular sympathy for 
the Armenians, for it was not till much later 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 51 

that I got to know them and their high intel- 
lectual qualities through personal intercourse. 

Here I can only give my final judgment on 
all these pros and cons, and say to the best of 
my knowledge and opinion, that after the first 
act in this drama of massacre and death — the 
brutal "evacuation of the war zone" in Ar- 
menia Proper — the meanest, the lowest, the 
most cynical, most criminal act of race-fanati- 
cism that the history of mankind has to show 
was the extension of the system of deportation, 
with its wilful neglect and starvation of the 
victims, to further hundreds of thousands of 
Armenians in the Capital and Interior. And 
these were people who, through their place of 
residence, their surroundings, their social stat- 
us, their preoccupation in work and wage- 
earning, were quite incapable of taking any 
active part in politics. 

Others of them, again, belonged to families 
of high social standing and culture, bound to 
the land by a thousand ties, coming of a well- 
to-do, old-established stock, and from tradi- 
tional training and ordinary prudence holding 
themselves scrupulously apart from all revo- 
lutionary doings. All were surrounded by a 



52 TWO WAR YEARS 

far superior number of inhabitants belonging 
to other races. 

This diabolical crime was committed solely 
and only because of the Turkish feeling of 
economic and intellectual inferiority to that 
non-Turkish element, for the set purpose of 
obtaining handsome compensation for them- 
selves, and was undertaken with the cowardly 
acquiescence of the German Government in 
full knowledge of the facts. 

Of this long chain of crime I saw at least the 
beginning thousands of times with my own 
eyes. Hardly had I returned from my first 
visit to the Dardanelles when these persecu- 
tions began in the whole of Anatolia and even 
in Constantinople, and continued with but 
slight intermissions of a week or two at dif- 
ferent times till shortly before I left Constanti- 
nople in December 1916. 

That was the time when in the flourishing 
western vilajets of Anatolia, beginning with 
Brussa and Adabazar, where the well-stocked 
farms in Armenian hands must have been an 
eyesore to a Government that had written 
"forcible Nationalisation" on their standard, 
the whole household goods of respectable fam- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 53 

ilies were thrown into the street and sold for 
a mere nothing, because their owners often 
had only an hour till they were routed out by 
the waiting gendarme and hustled off into the 
Interior. The fittings of the houses, naturally 
unsaleable in the hurry, usually fell to the lot 
of marauding ''mohadjis" (Mohammedan im- 
migrants), who, often enough armed to the 
teeth by the "Committee," began the disturb- 
ances which were then exposed as "Armenian 
conspiracies." 

That was the time when mothers, apparently 
in absolute despair, sold their own children, 
because they had been robbed of their last 
penny and could not let their children perish 
on that terrible march into the distant Interior. 

How many countless times did I have to 
look on at that typical spectacle of little bands 
of Armenians belonging to the capital being 
escorted through the streets of Pera by two 
gendarmes in their ragged murky grey uni- 
forms with their typical brutal Anatolian faces, 
while a policeman who could read and write 
marched behind with a notebook in his hand, 
beckoning people at random out of the crowd 
with an imperious gesture, and if their papers 



54 TWO WAR YEARS 

showed them to be Armenians, simply herding 
them in with the rest and marching them off 
to the ''Karakol" of Galata-Serai, the chief 
poHce-station in Pera, where he delivered up 
his daily bag of Armenians ! 

The way these imprisonments and deporta- 
tions were carried on is a most striking con- 
futation of the claims of the Turkish Govern- 
ment that they were acting only in righteous 
indignation over the discovery of a great con- 
spiracy. This is entirely untrue. 

With the most cold-blooded calculation and 
method, the number of Armenians to be de- 
ported were divided out over a period of many 
months, indeed one may say over nearly a 
year and a half. The deportations only be- 
gan to abate when the downfall of the Ar- 
menian Patriarchate in sunmier 1916 dealt 
the final blow to the social life of the Armen- 
ians. They more or less ceased in December 
1916 with the gathering-in of all those who 
had formerly paid the military exemption tax 
— among them many eminent Armenian busi- 
ness men. 

What can be said of the "righteous, spon- 
taneous indignation" of the Armenian Govern- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 55 

ment when, for example, of two Armenian 
porters belonging to the same house — ^brothers 
— one is deported to-day and the other not till 
a fortnight later; or when the number of Ar- 
menians to be delivered up daily from a cer- 
tain quarter of the town is fixed at a definite 
figure, say two hundred or a thousand, as I 
have been told was the case by reliable Turks 
who were in full touch with the police organi- 
sation and knew the system of these deporta- 
tions ? 

Of the ebb and flow of these persecutions, 
all that can be said is that the daily number of 
deportations increased when the Turks were 
annoyed over some Russian victory, and that 
the banishments miraculously abated when the 
military catastrophes of Erzerum, Trebizond, 
and Erzindjan gave the Government food for 
thought and led them to wonder if perhaps 
Nemesis was going to overtake them after all. 

And then the method of transport! Every 
day towards evening, when these unfortunate 
creatures had been collected in the police-sta- 
tions, the women and children were packed 
into electric-trams while the men and boys were 
compelled to go off on foot to Galata with a 



56 TWO WAR YEARS 

couple of blankets and only the barest neces- 
sities for their terrible journey packed in a 
small bag. Of course they were not all poor 
people by any means. 

This dire fate might befall anyone any day 
or any hour, from the caretaker and the trades- 
man to members of the best families. I know 
cases where men of high education, belonging 
to aristocratic families — engineers, doctors, 
lawyers — were banished from Pera in this dis- 
gusting way under cover of darkness to spend 
the night on the platforms of the Haidar- 
Pasha station, and then be packed off in the 
morning on the Anatolian Railway — of course 
they paid for their tickets and all travelling ex- 
penses! — ^to the Interior, where they died of 
spotted typhus, or, in rare cases after their 
recovery from this terrible malady, were per- 
mitted, after endless pleading, to return broken 
in body and soul to their homes as "harmless." 
Among these bands herded about from pillar 
to post like cattle there were hundreds and 
thousands of gentle, refined women of good 
family and of perfect European culture and 
manners. 

For the most part it was the sad fate of 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 57 

those deported to be sent off on an endless 
journey by foot, to the far-off Arabian fron- 
tier, where they were treated with the most 
terrible brutality. There, in the midst of a 
population wholly foreign and but little sjm- 
pathetie to their race, left to their fate on a 
barren mountain-side, without money, with- 
out shelter, without medical assistance, without 
the means of earning a livelihood, they perished 
in want and misery. 

The women and children were always sep- 
arated from the men. That was the charac- 
teristic of all the deportations. It was an at- 
tempt to strike at the very core of their na- 
tional being and annihilate them by the tear- 
ing asunder of all family ties. 

That was how a very large part of the Ar- 
menian people disappeared. They were the 
"persons transported elsewhere," as the ele- 
gant title of the "Provisional Han" ran, which 
gave full stewardship over their well-stocked 
farms to the "Committee" with its zeal for 
"internal colonisation" with purely Turkish 
elements. In this way the great goal was 
reached — the forcible nationalisation of a land 
of mixed races. 



58 TWO WAR YEARS 

While Anatolia was gradually emptied of 
all the forces that had hitherto made for prog- 
ress, while the deserted towns and villages 
and flourishing fields of those who had been 
banished fell into the hands of the lowest ''Mo- 
had jr'' — ^hordes of the most dissipated Moham- 
medan emigrants — that stream of unhappy be- 
ings trickled on ever more slowly to its dis- 
tant goal, leaving the dead bodies of women 
and children, old men and boys, as milestones 
to mark the way. The few that did reach the 
"settlement" alive — that is, the fever-ridden, 
hunger-stricken concentration camps — con- 
tinually molested by raiding Bedouins and 
Kurds, gradually sickened and died a slower 
and even more terrible death. 

Sometimes even this was not speedy enough 
for the Government, and a case occurred in 
Autumn 1916 — absolutely verified by state- 
ments made by German employees on the 
Baghdad Railway — ^where some thousands of 
Armenians, brought as workers to this stretch 
of railway, simply vanished one day without 
leaving a trace. Apparently they were simply 
shipped off into the desert without more ado 
and there massacred. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 59 

This terrible catalogue of crime on the part 
of the Government of Talaat is, however, in 
spite of all censorship and obstruction, being 
dealt with officially in all quarters of the globe 
— by the American Embassy at Constanti- 
nople and in neutral and Entente countries — 
and at the conclusion of peace it will be 
brought as an accusation against the criminal 
brotherhood of Young Turks by a merciless 
court of all the civilised nations of the world. 

I have spoken to Armenians who have said 
to me, "In former times the old Sultan Abdul- 
Hamid used to have us massacred by thou- 
sands. We were delivered over by well-or- 
ganised pogroms to the Kurds at stated times, 
and certainly we suffered cruelly enough. 
Then the Young Turks, as Adana 1909 shows, 
started on a bloodshed of thousands. But 
after what we have just gone through we long 
with all our hearts for the days of the old 
massacres. Now it is no longer a case of a 
certain nimiber of massacred; now our whole 
people is being slowly but surely exterminated 
by the national hatred of an apparently civi- 
lised, apparently modern, and therefore infi- 
nitely more dangerous Government. 



60 TWO WAR YEARS 

"Now they get hold of our women and chil- 
dren and send them long journeys on foot to 
concentration camps in barren districts where 
they die. The pitiful remains of our popula- 
tion in the villages and towns of the Interior, 
where the local authorities have carried out the 
commands of the central Government most 
zealously, are forcibly converted to Islam, and 
our young girls are confined in Turkish ha- 
rems and places of low repute. 

"The race is to vanish to the very last man, 
and why? Because the Turks have recog- 
nised their intellectual bankruptcy, their eco- 
nomic incompetence, and their social inferi- 
ority to the progressive Armenian element, to 
which Abdul-Hamid, in spite of occasional 
massacres, knew well enough how to adapt 
himself, and which he even utilised in all its 
power in high offices of state. Because now 
that they themselves are being decimated by a 
weary and unsuccessful war of terrible blood- 
shed that was lost before it was begun, they 
hope in this way to retain the sympathy of 
their peoples and preserve the superiority of 
their element in the State. 

"These are not sporadic outbursts of wrath. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 61 

as they were in the case of Hamid, but a defi- 
nitely thought-out political measure against 
our people, and for this very reason they can 
hope for no mercy. Germany, as we have seen, 
tolerates the annihilation of our people through 
weakness and lack of conscience, and if the 
war lasts much longer the Armenian people 
will have ceased to exist. That is why we long 
for the old regime of Abdul-Hamid, terrible 
as it was for us." 

Has there ever been a greater tragedy in 
the history of a people — and of a people that 
have never held any illusions as to political in- 
dependence, wedged in as they are between 
two Great Powers, and who had no real irre- 
dentistic feelings towards Russia, and, up to 
the moment when the Young Turks betrayed 
them shamefully and broke the ties of com- 
radeship that had bound them together as revo- 
lutionaries against the old despotic system of 
Abdul-Hamid, were as thoroughly loyal citi- 
zens of the Ottoman Empire as any of the 
other peoples of this land, excepting perhaps 
the Turks themselves. 

I hope that these few words may have given 
sufficient indication of the spirit and outcome 



62 TWO WAR YEARS 

of this system of extermination. I should like 
to mention just one more episode which af- 
fected me personally more than anything I ex- 
perienced in Turkey. 

One day in the simimer of 1916 my wife 
went out alone about midday to buy some- 
thing in the "Grand Rue de Pera." We lived 
a few steps from Galata-Serai and had plenty 
of opportunity from our balcony of seeing the 
bands of Armenian deportees arriving at the 
police-station under the escort of gendarmes. 
Familiarity with such sights finally dulled our 
sympathies, and we began to think of them not 
as episodes affecting human individuals, but 
rather as political events. 

On this particular day, however, my wife 
came back to the house trembling all over. She 
had not been able to go on her errand. As she 
passed the "karakol," she had heard through 
the open hall door the agonising groans of a 
tortured being, a dull wailing like the sound 
of an animal being tormented to death. ''An 
Armenian," she was informed by the people 
standing at the door. The crowd was then 
dispersed by a policeman. 

"If such scenes occur in broad daylight in 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 63 

the busiest part of the European town of 
Pera, I should like to know what is done to 
Armenians in the uncivilised Interior," my 
wife asked me. "If the Turks act like wild 
beasts here in the capital, so that a woman go- 
ing through the main streets gets a shock like 
that to her nerves, then I can't live in this 
frightful country." And then she burst into 
a fit of sobbing and let loose all her pent-up 
passion against what she and I had had to 
witness for more than a year every time we 
set a foot out of doors. 

"You are brutes, you Germans, miserable 
brutes, that you tolerate this from the Turks 
when you still have the country absolutely in 
your hands. You are cowardly brutes, and 
I will never set foot in your horrible country 
again. God, how I hate Germany!" 

It was then, when my own wife, trembling 
and sobbing, in grief, rage, and disgust at such 
cowardliness, flung this denunciation of my 
country in my teeth that I finally and abso- 
lutely broke with Germany. Unfortunately I 
had known only too long that it had to come. 

I thought of the conversations I had had 
about the Armenian question with members of 



64 TWO WAR YEARS 

the German Embassy in Constantinople and, 
of a very different kind, with Mr. Morgenthau, 
the American Ambassador. 

I had never felt fully convinced by the pro- 
testations of the German Embassy that they 
had done their utmost to put a check on the 
murderous attacks on harmless Armenians far 
from the theatre of war, who from their whole 
surroundings and their social class could not 
be in a position to take an active part in poli- 
tics, and on the cold-blooded neglect and star- 
vation of women and children apparently de- 
ported for no other reason than to die. The 
attitude of the German Government towards 
the Armenian question had impressed me as a 
mixture of cowardice and lack of conscience on 
the one hand and the most short-sighted stu- 
pidity on the other. 

The American Ambassador, who took the 
most generous interest in the Armenians, and 
has done so much for the cause of humanity in 
Turkey, was naturally much too reserved on 
this most burning question to give a German 
journalist like myself his true opinion about 
the attitude of his German colleagues. But 
from the many conversations and discussions 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 65 

I had with him, I gathered nothing that would 
turn me from the opinion I had already formed 
of the German Embassy, and I had given him 
several hints of what that opinion was. 

The attitude of Germany was, in the first 
place, as I have said, one of boundless cow- 
ardice. For we had the Turkish Govern- 
ment firmly enough in hand, from the mili- 
tary as well as the financial and political point 
of view, to insist upon the observance of the 
simplest principles of humanity if we wanted 
to. Enver, and still more Talaat, who as Min- 
ister of the Interior and really Dictator of 
Turkey was principally responsible for the 
Armenian persecutions, had no other choice 
than to follow Germany's lead unconditionally, 
and they would have accepted without any 
hesitation, if perhaps with a little grumbling, 
any definite ruling of Germany's even on this 
Armenian question that lay so near their 
hearts. 

From hundreds of examples it has been 
proved that the Germany Embassy never 
showed any undue delicacy for even perfectly 
legitimate Turkish interests and feelings in 
matters affecting German interests, and that 



Qe TWO WAR YEARS 

they always got their own way where it was 
a question, for example, of Germans being op- 
pressed, or superseded by Turks in the Gov- 
ernment and ruling bodies. And yet I had to 
stand and look on when our Embassy was not 
even capable of granting her due and proper 
rights to a perfectly innocent German lady 
married to an Armenian who had been de- 
ported with many other Armenians. She ap- 
pealed for redress to the German Embassy, 
but her only reward was to wait day after day 
in the vestibule of the Embassy for her case to 
be heard. 

Turks themselves have found cynical en- 
joyment in this measureless cowardice of ours 
and compared it with the attitude of the Rus- 
sian Government, who, if they had found them- 
selves in a similar position to Germany, would 
have been prepared, in spite of the Capitula- 
tions being abolished, to make a political case, 
if necessary, out of the protection due to one 
poor Russian Jew. Turks have, very politely 
but none the less definitely, made it quite clear 
to me that at bottom they felt nothing but con- 
tempt for our policy of letting things slide. 

Our attitude was characterised, secondly, by 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 67 

lack of conscience. To look on while life and 
property, the well-being and culture of thou- 
sands, are sacrificed, and to content oneself 
with weak formal protests when one is in a 
position to take most energetic command of 
the situation, is nothing but the most criminal 
lack of conscience, and I cannot get rid of the 
suspicion that, in spite of the fine official 
phrases one was so often treated to in the Ger- 
man Embassy on the subject of the ''Armenian 
problem," our diplomats were very little con- 
cerned with the preservation of this people. 

What leads me to bring this terrible charge 
against them? The fact that I never saw any- 
thing in all this pother on the part of our diplo- 
mats when the venerable old Armenian Pa- 
triarch appeared at the Embassy with his suite 
after some particularly frightful sufferings of 
the Armenian population, and begged with 
tears in his eyes for help from the Embassy, 
however late — and I assisted more than once 
at such scenes in the Embassy and listened to 
the conversations of the officials — I never saw 
anything but concern about German prestige 
and offended vanity. As far as I saw, there 
was never any concern for the fate of the Ar- 



68 TWO WAR YEARS 

menian people. The fact that time and again 
I heard from the mouths of Germans of all 
grades, from the highest to the lowest, so far 
as they did not have to keep strictly to the 
official German versions, expressions of hatred 
against the Armenians which were based on 
the most short-sighted judgment, had no rela- 
tion to the facts of the case, and were merely 
thoughtless fechoes of the official Turkish state- 
ments. 

And cases have actually been proved to have 
occurred, from the testimony of German doc- 
tors and Red Cross nurses returned from the 
Interior, of German officers light-heartedly 
taking the initiative in exterminating and scat- 
tering the Armenians when the less-zealous lo- 
cal authorities who still retained some rem- 
nants of human feeling, scrupled to obey the 
instructions of "Nur-el-Osmanieh" (the head- 
quarters of the Committee at Stamboul) . 

The case is well known and has been abso- 
lutely verified of the scandalous conduct of 
two German officers passing through a village 
in far Asia Minor, where the Armenians had 
taken refuge in their houses and barricaded 
them to prevent being herded off like cattle. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 69 

The order had been given that guns were to 
be turned on them, but not a single Turk had 
the courage to carry out this order and fire 
on women and children. Without any author- 
ity whatsoever, the two German officers then 
turned to and gave an exhibition of their shoot- 
ing capacities ! 

Such shameful acts are of course isolated 
cases, but they are on a par with the opinions 
expressed about the Armenian people by doz- 
ens of educated Germans of high position — 
not to speak of military men at all. 

A case of this kind where German soldiers 
were guilty of an attack on Armenians in the 
interior of Anatolia, was the subject of fre- 
quent official discussion at the German Em- 
bassy, and was finally brought to the notice of 
the authorities in Germany by Graf Wolff- 
Metternich, a really high-principled and hu- 
mane man. The material result of this was 
that through the unheard-of cowardice of our 
Government, this man — ^who in spite of his 
age and in contrast to the weak-minded Frei- 
herr von Wangenheim, and criminally opti- 
mistic had made many an attempt to get a 
firmer grip of the Turkish Government — ^was 



70 TWO WAR YEARS 

simply hounded out of office by the Turks and 
weakly sacrificed without a struggle by Berlin. 

What, finally, is one to think of the spirit 
of our German officials in regard to the Ar- 
menian question, when one hears such well- 
verified tales as were told me shortly before I 
left Constantinople by an eminent Hungarian 
banker (whose name I will not reveal) ? He 
related, for example, that "a German officer, 
with the title of Baron, and closely connected 
with the military attache," went one day to the 
bazaar in Stamboul and chose a valuable car- 
pet from an Armenian, which he had put down 
to his account and sent to his house in Pera. 
Then when it came to paying for it, he prompt- 
ly set the price twenty pounds lower than had 
been stipulated, and indicated to the Armenian 
dealer that in view of the good understanding 
between himself (the officer) and the Turkish 
President of police, he would do well not to 
trouble him further in the matter ! I only cite 
this case because I am unfortunately compelled 
to believe in its absolute authenticity. 

Shortsighted stupidity, finally, is how I 
characterised the inactive toleration on the part 
of our Imperial representatives of this policy 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 71 

of extermination of the Armenian race. Our 
Government could not have been blind to the 
breaking flood of Turkish jingoism, and no 
one with any glimmer of foresight could have 
doubted for a moment since the summer of 
1915 that Turkey would only go with us so 
long as she needed our military and financial 
aid, and that we should have no place, not even 
a purely commercial one, in a fully turkified 
Turkey. 

In spite of the lamentations one heard often 
enough from the mouths of officials over this 
well-recognised and unpalatable fact, we tol- 
erated the extermination of a race of over one 
and a half million of people of progressive 
culture, with the European point of view, in- 
tellectually adaptable, absolutely free from 
jingoism and fanaticism, and eminently cosmo- 
politan in feeling; we permitted the disappear- 
ance of the only conceivable counterbalance 
to the hopelessly nationalistic, anti-foreign 
Young Turkish element, and through our cow- 
ardice and lack of conscience have made deadly 
enemies of the few that will rise from the ruins 
of a race that used to be in thorough sympathy 
with Germany. 



72 TWO WAR YEARS 

An intelligent German Government would, 
in face of the increasingly evident Young 
Turkish spirit, have used every means in their 
power to retain the sympathies of the Arme- 
nians, and indeed to win them in greater 
numbers. The Armenians waited for us, trem- 
bled with impatience for us, to give a definite 
ruling. Their disappointment, their hatred of 
us is unbounded now — ^^and rightly so — and if 
a German ever again wants to take up busi- 
ness in the East he will have to reckon with this 
afHicted people so long as one of them exists. 

To answer the Armenian question in the way 
I have done here, one does not necessarily need 
to have the slightest liking or the least sym- 
pathy for them as a race. (I have, however, 
intimated that they deserve at least that much 
from their high intellectual and social abilities.) 
One only requires to have a feeling for human- 
ity to abhor the way in which hundreds of 
thousands of these unfortunate people were 
disposed of; one only requires to understand 
the commercial and social needs of a vast 
country like Turkey, so undeveloped and yet 
so capable of development, to place the high- 
est value on the preservation of this restless. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 73 

active, and eminently useful element; one only 
requires to open one's eyes and look at the 
facts dispassionately to deny utterly and abso- 
lutely what the Turks have tried to make the 
world believe about the Armenians, in order 
that they might go on with their work of ex- 
termination in peace and quiet; one only re- 
quires to have a slight feeling of one's dignity 
as a German to refuse to condone the pitiful 
cowardice of our Government over the Ar- 
menian question. 

The mixture of cowardice, lack of conscience, 
and lack of foresight of which our Government 
has been guilty in Armenian affairs is quite 
enough to undermine completely the political 
loyalty of any thinking man who has any re- 
gard for humanity and civilisation. Every 
German cannot be expected to bear as light- 
heartedly as the diplomats of Pera the shame 
of having history point to the fact that the an- 
nihilation, with every refinement of cruelty, 
of a people of high social development, num- 
bering over one and a half million, was con- 
temporaneous with Germany's greatest power 
in Turkey. 

In long confidential reports to my paper I 



74 TWO WAR YEARS 

made perfectly clear to them the whole posi- 
tion with regard to the Armenian persecutions 
and the brutal jingoistic spirit of the Young 
Turks apparent in them. The Foreign Office, 
too, took notice of these reports. But I saw 
no trace of the fruits of this knowledge in the 
attitude of my paper. 

The determination never to re-enter the edi- 
torial offices of that paper came to me on that 
dramatic occasion when my wife hurled her 
denunciation of Germany in my teeth. I at 
least owe a personal debt of gratitude to the 
poor murdered and tortured Armenians, for 
it is to them I owe my moral and political en- 
franchisement. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 75 



CHAPTER IV 

The tide of war — Enver's offensive for the "liberation 
of the Caucasus" — The Dardanelles Campaign; the 
fate of Constantinople twice hangs in the balance — 
Nervous tension in international Pera — Bulgaria's 
attitude — Turkish rancour against her former en- 
emy — German illusions of a separate peace with 
Russia — King Ferdinand's time-serving — Lack of 
munitions in the Dardanelles — ^A mysterious death: 
a political murder? — The evacuation of Gallipoli — 
The Turkish version of victory — Constantinople un- 
released — Kut-el-Amara — Propaganda for the 
"Holy War" — A prisoner of repute — Loyalty of 
Anglo-Indian oflScers — Turkish communiques and 
their worth — The fall of Erzerum — Official lies — 
The treatment of prisoners — Political speculation 
with prisoners of war — Treatment of enemy sub- 
jects — Stagnation and lassitude in the summer of 
1916— The Greeks in Turkey— Dread of Greek 
massacres — Rumania's entry — Terrible disappoint- 
ment — The three phases of the war for Turkey. 

It will be necessary to devote a few lines to 
a review of the principal features of the war, 



76 TWO WAR YEARS 

so far as it affected the life of the Turkish 
capital, in order to have a military and po- 
litical background for what I saw among the 
Turks during my twenty months' stay in their 
country. To that I will add a short descrip- 
tion of the economic situation. 

When I arrived in Constantinople, Turkey 
had already completed her first winter cam- 
paign in the Caucasus, and had repelled the at- 
tack of the Entente fleet on the Dardanelles, 
culminating in the events of March 18th, 1915. 
But Enver Pasha had completely misjudged 
the relation between the means at his disposal 
and the task before him when, put of pure 
vanity and a mad desire for expansion, he 
undertook a personally conducted offensive 
for "the liberation of the Caucasus." The ter- 
rible defeats inflicted on the Turkish army on 
this occasion were kept from the knowledge 
of the people by a rigorous censorship and the 
falsification of the communiques. This was 
particularly the case in the enormous Turkish 
losses sustained at Sarykamish. 

Enver had put this great Caucasus offensive 
in hand out of pure wanton folly, thinking by 
so doing to win laurels for himself and to have 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 77 

something tangible to show those Turkish ul- 
tra-Nationalists who always had an eye on 
Turkestan and Turan and thought that now 
was the time to carry out their programme of 
a * 'Greater Turkey." It was this mad under- 
taking, bound as it was to come to grief, that 
first showed Enver Pasha in his true colours. 
I shall have something to say about his char- 
acter in another connection, which will show 
how gravely he has been over-estimated in 
Europe. 

From the beginning of March 1915 to the 
beginning of January 1916 the situation was 
practically entirely commanded by the battles 
in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. It has now 
been accepted as a recognised fact even in the 
countries belonging to the Entente that the 
sacrifice of a few more ships on March 18th 
would have decided the fate of the Dardanelles. 
To their great astonishment the gallant de- 
fenders of the coast forts found that the at- 
tack had suddenly ceased. Dozens of the Ger- 
man naval gunners who were manning the bat- 
teries of Chanakkale on that memorable day 
told me later that they had quite made up their 
minds the fleet would ultimately win, and that 



78 TWO WAR YEARS 

they themselves could not have held out much 
longer. Such an outcome was expected hourly 
in Constantinople, and I was told by influen- 
tial people that all the archives, stores of 
money, etc., had already been removed to Ko- 
nia. 

It is a remarkable fact that for a second time, 
in the first days of September, the fate of 
Constantinople was again hanging in the bal- 
ance — a fact which is no longer a secret in 
England and France. The British had ex- 
tended their line northwards from Ariburnu 
to Anaforta, and a heroic dash by the Anzacs 
had captured the summit of the Koja-Jemen- 
Dagh, and so given them direct command of 
the whole peninsula of Gallipoli and the insuf- 
ficiently protected Dardanelles forts behind 
them. It is still a mystery to the people of 
Constantinople why the British troops did not 
follow up this victory. The fact is that this 
time again the money and archives were hur- 
ried off from Constantinople to Asia, and a 
German officer in Constantinople gave me the 
entertaining information that he had really 
seriously thought of hiring a window in the 
Grand' Rue de Pera, so that he and his family 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 79 

might watch the triumphal entry of the En- 
tente troops! It would be easier to enjoy the 
joke of this if it were not overshadowed by 
such fearful tragedy. 

I have already indicated the dilemma in 
which I was placed on my first and second 
visits to the Gallipoli front. I was torn by con- 
flicting doubts as to whom my sympathies 
ought ultimately to turn to — to the heroic 
Turkish defender, who was indeed fighting for 
the existence of his country, although in an un- 
successful and unjust cause, for German mih- 
tarism and the exaggerated jingoism of the 
Young Turks, or to those who were oflicially 
my enemies but whom, knowing as I did who 
was responsible for the great crime of the war, 
I could not regard as such. 

In those September days I had already had 
some experience of Turkish politics and their 
defiance of the laws of humanity, and my sym- 
pathies were all for those thousands of fine 
colonial troops — such men as one seldom sees — 
sacrificing their lives in one last colossal at- 
tack, which if it had been prolonged even for 
another hour might have sealed the fate of the 
Straits and would have meant the first deci- 



80 TWO WAR YEARS 

sive step towards the overthrow of our forces; 
for the capture of Constantinople would have 
been the beginning of the end. I am not 
ashamed to confess that, German as I am, that 
was the only feeling I had when I heard of 
the British victory and the subsequent British 
defeat at Anaforta. The Battle of Anaforta 
was the last desperate attempt to break the 
resistance in the Dardanelles. 

While the men of Stamboul and Anatolia^ — 
the nucleus of the Ottoman Empire — ^were de- 
fending the City of the Caliph at the gate of 
the Dardanelles, with reinforcements from 
Arab regiments when they were utterly ex- 
hausted in the autumn, the other half of the 
metropolis, the cosmopolitan Galata-Pera, was 
trembling for the safety of the attacking En- 
tente troops, and lived through the long months 
in a state of continual tension, longing always 
for the moment of release. 

There was a great deal of nervous calcula- 
tion about the probable attitude of Bulgaria 
among both the Turks and the thousands of 
thoroughly illoyal citizens of the Ottoman Em- 
pire composing the population of the capital. 
From lack of information and also as a result 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 81 

of Bulgaria's long delay in declaring her at- 
titude, an undue optimism ruled right up to 
the last moment among those who desired the 
overthrow of the Turks. 

The Bulgarian question was closely bound 
up with the question of the munitions supply. 
The Turkish resistance on Gallipoli threat- 
ened to collapse through lack of munitions, and 
general interest centred — ^with very varied de- 
sires with regard to the outcome — on the rare 
ammunition trains that were brought through 
Rumania only after an enormous expenditure 
of Turkish powers of persuasion and the ap- 
plication of any amount of "palm-oil." 

I was present at Sedd-ul-Bahr at the be- 
ginning of July, when, owing to lack of am- 
munition, the German-Turkish artillery could 
only reply with one shot to every ten British 
ones, while the insufficiently equipped facto- 
ries of Top-hane and Zeitun-burnu, under the 
control of General Pieper, Director of Muni- 
tions, were turning out as many shells as was 
possible with the inferior material at their dis- 
posal, and the Turkish fortresses in the In- 
terior had to send their supply of often very 
antiquated ammunition to the Dardanelles. 



82 TWO WAR YEARS 

The whole dramatic import of the situation, 
which might any day give rise to epoch-making 
events, was only too evident in Constantinople. 
It is not to be wondered at that everyone looked 
forward with feverish impatience to Bulgaria's 
entry either on one side or the other. 

But, in spite of all this, the Turks could 
scarcely bear the sight of the first Bulgarian 
soldiers who appeared in autumn 1915 in full 
uniform in the streets of "Carihrad." The 
necessary surrender of the land along the Ma- 
ritza right to the gates of the holy city of "Ed- 
irne" (Adrianople) was but little to the liking 
of the Turkish patriots, and even the success- 
ful issue of the Dardanelles campaign, only 
made possible by Bulgaria's joining the Cen- 
tral Powers, was not sufficient to win the real 
sympathies of the Turks for their new allies. 

It was not until much later that the position 
was altered as a result of the combined fight- 
ing in Dobrudja. Practically right up to the 
end of 1916, the real, short-sighted, jingoistic 
Turk looked askance at his new ally and viewed 
with irritation and distrust the desecration of 
his sacred ''Edirne," the symbol of his national 
renaissance, while the ambition of all politi- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 83 

cians was to bring Bulgaria one day to a sur- 
render of the lost territory and more. 

Even in 1916 I found Young Turks, belong- 
ing to the Committee, who still regarded the 
Bulgarians as their erstwhile cunning foe and 
as a set of unscrupulous, unsympathetic op- 
portunists who might again become a menace 
to them. They even admitted that the Serbs 
were "infinitely nicer enemies in the Balkan 
war," and appealed to them very much more 
than the Bulgarians. The late Prince Yussuf 
Izzedin Effendi, of whose tragic death I shall 
speak later, was always a declared opponent 
of the cession of the Maritza territory. 

The possibility of Bulgaria's voluntarily sur- 
rendering this territory and possibly much 
more through extending her own possessions 
westward if Greece joined the Entente, had 
a great deal to do with Turkey's attitude dur- 
ing the whole of 1916, and goes far to explain 
why she dallied so long over the idea of alienat- 
ing Greece, and used all sorts of chicanery 
against the Ottoman and Hellenic Greeks in 
Turkey. Another and much more important 
factor was, as we shall see, fundamental race- 
hatred and avarice. 



84 TWO WAR YEARS 

As the question as to which side Bulgaria 
was to join was of decisive moment for Turk- 
ish pohtics, I may perhaps be permitted to add 
a few details from personal information. I 
had an interesting sidelight on the German at- 
tempts to win over Bulgaria from a well-in- 
formed source in Sofia. Everyone was much 
puzzled over the apparent clumsiness of the 
German Ambassador in Sofia, Dr. Micha- 
helles, in his diplomatic mission to gain help 
from Bulgaria. King Ferdinand, of course, 
made great difficulties, and at a very early 
stage of the proceedings he turned to the 
Prime Minister, Radoslavoff , and said : "Away 
with your German Jews ! Why don't you take 
the good French gold?" (referring, of course, 
to the offered French loan). 

The king was cunning enough in his own 
way, but he was a poor politician and utterly 
vacillating, for he had no sort of ideals to 
live up to and was prompted by a spirit of 
unworthy opportunism, and it needed Rado- 
slavoff 's threat of instant resignation to bring 
him to a definite decision. The transference 
shortly afterwards of the German Ambassa- 
dor to a northern post strengthened the im- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 85 

pression in confidential circles in Sofia that he 
had been lacking in diplomacy. 

The truth was that he had received most con- 
tradictory instructions from Berlin, which did 
not allow him to do his utmost to win Bulgaria 
for the German cause. The Imperial Chan- 
cellor seems even then — ^it was after the great 
German summer offensive against Russia — ^to 
have given serious consideration to the pos- 
sibility of a separate peace with Russia, and 
was quite convinced that Russia would never 
lay down arms without having humiliated Bul- 
garia, should the latter prove a traitor to the 
Slavic cause and turn against Serbia. 

In diplomatic circles in Berlin this know- 
ledge and the decision — so naive in view of all 
their boasted Weltpolitik — to pursue the quite 
illusory dream of a separate peace with Rus- 
sia, seemed to outweigh, at any rate for some 
time, anxiety with regard to the state of affairs 
in Gallipoli and the complete lack of munitions 
shortly to be expected, and lamed their initia- 
tive in their dealings with Bulgaria. 

It is probably not generally known that 
here again the military party assumed the lead 
in politics, and took the Bulgarian matter in 



86 TWO WAR YEARS 

hand themselves. In the space of no time at 
all, Bulgaria's entry on the German side was 
an accomplished fact. It was Colonel von 
Leipzig, the German military attache at the 
Constantinople Embassy, that clinched the 
matter at the critical moment by a journey to 
Sofia, and the whole thing was arranged in 
less than a fortnight. But that journey cost 
him his life. On the way back to the Turkish 
capital Herr von Leipzig — one of the nicest 
and most gentlemanly men that ever wore a 
field-grey uniform — ^visited the Dardanelles 
front, and on the little Thracian railway-sta- 
tion of Uzunkoprii he met his death mysteri- 
ously. He was found shot through the head 
in the bare little waiting-room of this miserable 
wayside station. 

It so happened that on my way to the Dar- 
danelles on that day at the end of June 1915, 
I passed through this little station, and was the 
sole European witness of this tragic event, 
which increased still further the excitement al- 
ready hanging over Constantinople in these 
weeks of lack of ammunition and terrible on- 
slaughts against Gallipoli, and which had al- 
ready risen to fever-heat over the nervous ru- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 87 

mours that were going the rounds as to Bul- 
garia's attitude. The occurrence, of course, 
was used by political intriguers for their own 
ends. 

I wrote a warm and truly heartfelt appre- 
ciation of this excellent man and good friend, 
which was published in my paper at the time, 
and it was not till long afterwards, weeks, in- 
deed, after my return, that I had any idea that 
the sudden death of Herr von Leipzig on his 
return from a mission of the highest political 
importance was looked upon by the German 
anti-English party as the work of English 
spies in the service of Mr. rFitzmaurice, who 
was formerly at the English Embassy in Con- 
stantinople. 

I was an eye-witness of the occurrence, or 
rather, I was beside the Colonel a minute after 
I heard the shot, and saw the hole in his re- 
volver-holster where the bullet had gone 
through. I heard the frank evidence of all 
the Turks present, from the policeman who 
had arrived first on the scene to the staff doc- 
tor who came later, and I immediately tele- 
graphed to my paper from the scene of the 



88 TWO WAR YEARS 

accident, giving them my impression of the 
affair. 

On my return to Constantinople I was in- 
vited to give evidence under oath before the 
German Consulate General, and there one may 
find the written evidence of what I had to say : 
a pure and absolute accident. 

I must not omit to mention here that the 
German authorities themselves in Constanti- 
nople were so thoroughly convinced that the 
idea of murder was out of the question, that 
Colonel von Leipzig's widow, who, believing 
this version of the story, hurried to Turkey, to 
make her own investigations, had the greatest 
difficulty in being officially received by the 
Embassy and Consulate. I had a long inter- 
view with her in the "Pera Palace," where she 
complained bitterly of her treatment in this 
respect. I have tarried a little over this tragic 
episode as it shows all the political ramifica- 
tions that ran together in the Turkish capital 
and the dramatic excitement that prevailed. 

The day came, however, when the Entente 
troops first evacuated Anaforta-Ariburnu, and 
then, after a long and protracted struggle, 
Sedd-ul-Bahr, and so the entire Gallipoli Pe- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 89 

ninsula. The Dardanelles campaign was at an 
end. 

The impossibility of ever breaking down 
that solid Turkish resistance, the sufferings of 
the soldiers practically starved to death in the 
trenches during the cold winter storms, the 
difficulties of obtaining supplies of provisions, 
drinking water, ammunition, etc., with a frozen 
sea and harbourless coast, anxiety about the su- 
perior heavy artillery that the enemy kept 
bringing up after the overthrow of Serbia — 
everything combined to strengthen the En- 
tente in their decision to put an end to the 
campaign in Gallipoli. 

The Turkish soldiers had now free access 
to the sea, for all the British Dreadnoughts and 
cruisers had disappeared; the warlike activity 
which had raged for months on the narrow 
GaHipoli Peninsula suddenly ceased ; Austrian 
heavy and medium howitzers undertook the 
coast defence, and a garrison of a few thousand 
Turkish soldiers stayed behind in the Narrows 
for precaution's sake, while the whole huge 
Gallipoli army in an endless train was marched 
off to the Taurus to meet the Russian advance 
threatening in Armenia. 



90 TWO WAR YEARS 

But Constantinople remained "unrelieved." 
And from that moment a dull resignation, a 
dreary waiting for one scarcely knew what, 
disappointment, and pessimism took the place 
of the nervous tension that had been so ap- 
parent in those who had been longing for the 
fall of the Turkish capital. 

But the Turks rejoiced. It is scarcely to 
be wondered at that they tried to construe the 
failure of the Gallipoli affair as a wonderful 
and dazzling victory for Islam over the com- 
bined forces of the Great Powers. It is only 
in line of course with Turkish official un- 
truthfulness that, in shameless perversion of 
facts, they talked glibly of the irresistible bay- 
onet attacks of their "ghazi" (heroes) and of 
thousands of Englishmen taken prisoner or 
chased back into the sea, whereas it was a 
well-known fact even in Pera that the retreat 
had been carried out in a most masterly way 
with practically no loss of life, and that the 
Turks themselves had been caught napping 
this time; but to lie is human, and the Turks 
owed it to their prestige to have an unmistak- 
able and great military victory to form the 
basis of that "Holy War" that was so long in 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 91 

getting under weigh ; and when all is said and 
done, their truly heroic defence really was a 
victory. 

The absurd thing about all these lies was the 
way they were foisted on a public who already 
knew the true state of affairs and had nothing 
whatever to do with the "Holy War." 

The Turks made even more of the second 
piece of good fortune that fell to their lot — 
the fall of Kut-el-Amara. General Town- 
shend became their cherished prisoner, and 
was provided with a villa on the island of Halki 
in the Sea of Marmora, with a staff of Turkish 
naval officers to act as interpreters. 

In the neighbouring and more fashionable 
Prinkipo he was received by practically every- 
one with open arms, and once even a concert 
was arranged in his honour, which was at- 
tended by the elite of Turkish and Levantine 
Society — the Turks because of their vanity and 
pride in their important prisoner of war, the 
Levantines because of their political sympathy 
with General Townshend, who, although there 
against his will, seemed to bring them a breath 
of that world they had lost all contact with 



92 TWO WAR YEARS 

for nearly two years and for which they longed 
with the most ardent and passionate desire. 

On the occasion of the Bairam Festival — the 
highest Musulman festival — in 1916, the Turk- 
ish Government made a point of sending a 
group of about seventy Anglo-Indian Moham- 
medan officers, who had been taken prisoner at 
the fall of Kut and were now interned in Eski- 
Shehir, to the ''Caliph City of Stamboul," 
where they were entertained for ten days in 
different Turkish hotels and shown everything 
that would seem to be of value for "Holy 
War" propaganda purposes. 

I had the opportunity of conversing with 
some of these Indian officers in the garden of 
the "Petit Champs," where their appearance 
one evening made a most tremendous sensa- 
tion. I had of course to be very discreet, for 
we were surrounded by spies, but I came away 
firmly convinced that, in spite of their good 
treatment, which was of course not without its 
purpose, and most unceasing and determined 
efforts to influence them, the Turkish propa- 
ganda so far as these Indian officers was con- 
cerned had entirely failed and that their loy- 
alty to England remained absolutely unshak- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 93 

en. Will anyone blame me, if, angry and dis- 
gusted as I was at all these Turkish intrigues — 
it was shortly after that dramatic scene of the 
tortured Armenian which called forth that de- 
nunciation of Germany from my wife — I said 
to a group of these Indians — just this and 
nothing more! — that they should not believe 
aU that the Turks told them, and that the re- 
sult of the war would be very different from 
what the Turks thought? One of the officers 
thanked me with glowing eyes on behalf of 
his comrades and himself, and told me what a 
comfort my assurance was to them. They had 
nothing to complain of, he said, save being 
cut off from all news except official Turkish 
reports. 

The very most that even the wildest fancy 
could find in events like Gallipoli and Kut- 
el-Amara was brought forward for the bene- 
fit of the "Holy War," but, despite every- 
thing, the propaganda was, as we have seen, 
a hopeless failure. Reverses such as the fall 
of Erzerum, Trebizond, and Ersindjan, on the 
contrary, which took place between the two 
above-mentioned victories, have never to this 
day been even so much as hinted at in the of- 



94 TWO WAR YEARS 

ficial war communiques for the Ottoman pub- 
lie. For the communiques for home and for- 
eign consumption were always radically dif- 
ferent. 

It was not until very much later, when 
the Turkish counter-offensive against Bitlis 
seemed to be bearing fruit, that a few mild 
indications of these defeats were made in Par- 
liament, with a careful suppression of all 
names, and the newspapers were empowered 
to make some mention of a ''purely temporary 
retreat of no strategic importance" which had 
then taken place. The usual stereotyped re- 
port of 3,000 or 5,000 dead that was officially 
given out after every battle throughout the 
whole course of operations in the Irak scarcely 
came off in this case, however, and, to tell the 
truth, Erzerum and these countless English 
dead reported in the Irak did more than any- 
thing else to undermine completely the peo- 
ple's already sadly shaken confidence in the of- 
ficial war communiques. 

If there was a real victory to be celebrated, 
the most stringent police orders were issued 
that flags were to be flown everywhere — on 
every building. Surely it is only in a land like 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 95 

Turkey that one could see the curious sight I 
witnessed after the fall of Bucharest — the vic- 
torious flags of the Central Powers, sur- 
mounted by the Turkish crescent, flying even 
from the balconies of Rumanian subjects, be- 
cause there had been a definite police warning 
issued that, in the case of non-compliance with 
the order, the houses would be immediately 
ransacked and the families inhabiting them sent 
off to the interior of Anatolia. Under the cir- 
cumstances, refusal to carry out police orders 
was impossible. That was the Turkish idea 
of the respect due to individual liberty. 

This gives me an opportunity to say some- 
thing of the treatment of prisoners. I may 
say in one word that it is, on the whole, good. 
Justice compels me to admit that the Turk, 
when he does take prisoners, treats them kind- 
ly and chivalrously ; but he takes few prisoners, 
for he knows only too well how to wield his 
bayonet in those murderous charges he makes. 
Indeed, apart from the few hundred that fell 
into their hands in the Dardanelles or on the 
Russo-Turkish front, together with the crews 
of a few captured submarines, all the Turkish 
prisoners of war come from Kut-el-Amara. 



96 TWO WAR YEARS 

But the primitive Turk is all too sadly lack- 
ing in the comforts of life himself to be able 
to provide them for his prisoners. Without the 
help of the Commission that works under the 
protection of the American Embassy for the 
relief of the Entente prisoners, and sends piles 
of warm clothing, excellent shoes (which rouse 
the special envy of the Turks), chocolate, 
cakes, etc., to the Anatolian camps, these men, 
accustomed to European ways of life, would be 
in a sad plight. 

The repeated and humiliating marching of 
prisoners of war through the streets of Con- 
stantinople to show them off to the childish 
gaze of a people much influenced by externals, 
might with advantage be dispensed with. And 
it was certainly not exactly kind to make 
wounded English officers process past the Sul- 
tan at the Friday's "Selamlik"; it was rather 
too like slave-driving methods and the abuses 
of the Middle Ages. 

I was an unwilling witness of one most re- 
grettable incident that took place shortly be- 
fore I left Constantinople. In this case the 
sufferings of some unfortunate prisoners of 
war were cruelly exploited for political ends. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 97 

A whole troup of about 2,000 Rumanians, 
from Dobrudja, were hounded up and down 
the streets of Pera and Stamboul in a pur- 
posely destitute and exhausted condition, so 
that the appearance of these poor wretches, 
who hung their heads dejectedly and had lost 
all trace of military bearing, might give the 
impression that the Turks were dealing with 
a very inferior foe and would soon be at the 
end of the business. This is how the authori- 
ties were going to increase the confidence of 
the doubting population! 

The Turkish escort had apparently given 
these prisoners nothing to drink on the way — 
although the Turk, being a great water-drinker 
himself, knows only too well what a man needs 
on a dusty journey of several days on a trans- 
port train — for with my own eyes I saw dozens 
of them simply flinging themselves like ani- 
mals full length on the ground when they 
reached the Taksim Fountain, and trying to 
slake their terrible thirst. It was with pitiable 
trickery like this — for which no doubt Enver 
Pasha was responsible, for the simple Turkish 
soldier is much too good-natured not to share 
his bread and water with his prisoners — that 



98 TWO WAR YEARS 

attempts were made, at the expense of all feel- 
ings of humanity, to cheer up the uneducated 
masses. 

The Turkish Government, however, apart 
from a few cases of reprisals, where the pris- 
oners were treated in an even more barbaric 
and primitive manner, did not, as a general 
rule, go the length of interning civilians. This 
was not without its own good grounds. In the 
first place, a very large part of the trade of the 
country lay in the hands of these Europeans, 
and they were consequently absolutely indis- 
pensable to the Turks in their everyday com- 
mercial life ; secondly, a Government that had 
systematically rooted out the Armenians, 
hanged Arabian notables, and brutally mis- 
handled the Greeks, could scarcely dispense, 
in the eyes of Europe, with the very last pre- 
tence of being more or less civilised; and, 
lastly, perhaps the fear of being brought to 
book later on may have had a restraining in- 
fluence on them — ^we saw how growing anxiety 
about the Russian advance on the Eastern 
front led, at any rate for a time, to a discon- 
tinuance of Armenian persecutions. 

Besides all this, hundreds and thousands of 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 99 

Turks were resident in enemy countries, and 
of course the desire was to avoid reprisals. So 
the Government contented itself with threats 
and subterfuges, after a first unsuccessful at- 
tempt to expose a large number of French sub- 
jects to fire from the enemy guns in Gal- 
lipoli — a plan which failed entirely, owing to 
the energetic opposition of officials of the 
American Embassy who had accompanied 
these chosen victims to GaDipoli. Every 
means was used, however, even announcements 
in the newspapers and a Vote of Credit "for 
the removal of enemy subjects to the interior," 
to keep the sword of Damocles for ever hang- 
ing over the heads of all subjects of Entente 
countries, even women and children. 

From the fall of Kut-el-Amara up to the 
time of Rumania's entry into the war, there 
were no important episodes of a military or 
political nature from the particular point of 
view of Turkey. ( The Arabian catastrophe I 
will deal with in another connection.) With 
the ebb and flow of war and constant anxiety 
about Russia's movements, time passed slowly 
enough. It was well known that the Turkish 
offensive was already considerably weakened 



100 TWO WAR YEARS 

and the lack of means of transport was an open 
secret. Starvation and spotted fever raged 
at the Front as well as in the interior and the 
capital. Asiatic cholera even made its ap- 
pearance in European Pera, but was fortu- 
nately successfully combated by vaccination. 

Further decisive Russian victories on the 
west and the Gulf of Alexandretta were ex- 
pected after the fall of Ersindjian, for the 
ambition and personal hatred against the 
Turks of the Grand Duke Nicolai Nicola ji- 
vitch, commanding the armies in Armenia, 
would probably stop short at nothing less than 
complete overthrow of the enemy. Simple- 
minded souls, whose geography was not their 
strong point, reckoned how long it would take 
the Russians to get from Anatolia and when 
the conquest of Constantinople would take 
place. 

The less optimistic among those who were 
panting for final emancipation from the 
Young Turkish military yoke set their hopes 
on the entry of Rumania. In all circles Ru- 
mania's probable attitude was fairly clear, and 
no one ever doubted that she would be drawn 
into the war. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 101 

In consequence of the new operations after 
Rumania's declaration of war, the revival of 
the offensive in Macedonia, and the events in 
Athens, all eyes were turned again to the ever- 
doubtful Greece. The Greek element, Otto- 
man and Hellenic combined, in Constantinople 
alone may be reckoned at several hundred thou- 
sand. Never were sympathies so great for 
Venizelos, never was the spirit of the Irredenta 
so outspoken as among the Greeks in Turkey, 
who had been the dupes since 1909 of every 
possible kind of Young Turkish intrigue. In 
contrast to the Armenians, the great mass of 
whom thought and felt as loyal Ottoman citi- 
zens right up to the very end when Talaat and 
Enver's policy of extermination set in against 
them — in contrast to these absolutely helpless 
and therefore all the more easy victims to the 
Turkish national lust of persecution, the atti- 
tude of the Greek citizens was all the more 
marked. 

Since the Grgeco-Turkish war of 1912-13 
and the impetus given to Pan-Hellenism by 
the successful issue of the war, there is not 
one single Greek in either country — no matter 
what his social standing — that has not ardently 



102 TWO WAR YEARS 

looked forward to and desired the overthrow 
of Turkey. But the Greek is much too clever 
to let his feelings be seen ; and he is not so un- 
protected as the Armenian. And so up to 
the present time the Turk has confined him- 
self more to small intrigues against the Greek 
population, except in a few remote districts — 
more especially the shores of the Black Sea — 
where massacres like those organised among 
the Armenians have been carried out, but on 
a very much smaller scale. 

Sympathy with Venizelos and the Irreden- 
tistic desire for Greece to throw in her lot with 
the Entente are counterbalanced, however, in 
the case of the Greeks living in Turkey, by 
grave anxiety as to their own welfare if it came 
to a break between the two countries. Turk- 
ish hatred of the Greeks knows no bounds, 
and it was no idle fear that made the Greeks 
in Constantinople tremble, in spite of their 
satisfaction politically, when the rumours were 
afloat in autumn 1916 of King Constantine's 
abdication and Greece's entry on the side of 
the Entente. 

But the ideas as to how the Turks would act 
towards them in such a case were diametrically 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 103 

opposed even among those who had lived in the 
country a long time and knew the Turkish 
mind exactly. Many expected immediate 
Greek massacres on the largest scale; others, 
again, expected only brutal intrigues and chi- 
canery, economic ruin ; still others thought that 
nothing at all would happen, that the Turks 
were already too demoralised, and that at any 
rate in Pera the far superior Greek element 
would completely command the situation. This 
last I considered mere megalomaniac optimism 
in view of the fact that Turkey was still un- 
broken so far as things military were con- 
cerned, and I believe that those people were 
right who believed that Greece's entry on the 
side of the Entente would be the signal for the 
carrying out of atrocities against all Greeks, 
at any rate in the commercial world. 

It would be interesting to know which idea 
the German authorities favoured. That the 
event would pass off without damage being 
done, they apparently did not believe, for in 
those days when Greece's decision seemed to 
be imminent, the former Goehen and the Bres- 
lau, which had been lying at Stenia on the Bos- 
porus, were brought up with all speed and an- 



104 TWO WAR YEARS 

chored just off the coast with their guns turned 
on Pera, and the German garrison, as I knew 
from different officers, had orders to be pre- 
pared for an alarm. 

Did the Germans think they were going to 
have to protect Turks or Greeks in the case 
of definite news from Athens? Was it Ger-* 
many's intention to protect the European 
population, who had nothing to do with the 
impending political decision, although they 
might sympathise with it — was it Germany's 
intention to protect them, at any rate in this 
instance, from the Turkish lust of extermina- 
tion? Had these two ships, now known as the 
Jawuz Sultan Selim and the Midilli, not be- 
longed for a long time to the Imperial Otto- 
man Navy? 

When Rumania flung off her shackles, there 
was great rejoicing in Pera, and even the 
greatest pessimists believed that relief was near 
and would be accomplished within two months 
at latest. But another and more terrible re- 
verse absolutely destroyed the last shred of 
anti-Turkish hope, and the victories in Ru- 
mania, especially the fall of Bucharest, com- 
bined with the speech of the Russian minister 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 105 

Trepoff, had the effect of sending over solid 
to the side of the Government even the few 
who had hitherto, at least in theory, formed 
an opposition, although a powerless one. 

Victories shared with the Bulgarians, too, 
did away with the last remains of unfriendly 
feelings towards that people and consolidated 
the Turko-Bulgarian Alliance. Indeed, one 
may say that for Turkey the third great phase 
of the war began with the removal of all dan- 
ger of the fall of Constantinople through the 
collapse of the Rumanian forces. 

The first comprised the time of the powerful 
attacks directed at the very heart of the Em- 
pire, its most vulnerable point, and ended with 
the English-French evacuation of Gallipoli. 
The second was the period of alternate suc- 
cesses and reverses, almost a time of stagna- 
tion, when practically all interest was centred 
on the Russian menace in Asia Minor and the 
efforts made to withstand it. It ended equally 
successfully with the removal of the Russian 
menace from the Balkans. The third will be 
the phase of increasing internal weakness, of 
the dissipation of strength through the sending 
of troops to Europe, of the successful renewal 



106 TWO WAR YEARS 

of the English offensive in Mesopotamia, per- 
haps even of an English-French offensive 
against Syria and of the final revolt of all the 
Arabian lands, ushered in by the events in the 
Hedjaz and the founding of a purdy Arabian 
Caliphate. The third phase cannot last longer 
than the year 1917 ; it will mean the decision of 
the whole European war. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 107 



CHAPTER V 

\ 

The economic situation — Exaggerated Entente hopes — 
Hunger and suffering among the civil population — 
The system of requisitioning and the semi-official 
monopolists — Profiteering on the part of the 
Government clique — Frivolity and cynicism — The 
"Djemiet" — The delegates of the German Zentral- 
einJcaufsgesellschaft (Central Purchases Commis- 
sion) — A hard battle between German and Turkish 
intrigue — Reform of the coinage — Paper money 
and its depreciation — The hoarding of bullion — 
The Russian rouble the best investment. 

During the entire course of the war as I have 
briefly sketched it in the foregoing pages, the 
economic situation in the whole country and 
particularly in the capital became more and 
more serious. But, let me just say here, in 
anticipation, that Turkey, being a purely agri- 
cultural country with a very modest popula- 
tion, can never be brought to sue for peace 
through starvation, nor, with Germany back- 
ing and financing her, through any general ex- 



108 TWO WAR YEARS 

haustion of commercial resources, until Ger- 
many herself is brought to her knees. Any 
victory must be a purely military and political 
one. The whole crux of the food problem in 
Turkey is that the people suffer, suffer cruelly, 
but not enough for hunger to have any results 
in the shape of an earlier conclusion of peace. 
This is the case also with the Central Powers, 
as the Entente have unfortunately only too 
surely convinced themselves now after their 
first illusions to the contrary. 

There is another element in the Turkish 
question too — ^the large majority of the popu- 
lation are a heterogeneous mass of enslaved 
and degenerate beings, outcasts of society, 
plunged in the lowest social and commercial 
depths, entirely lacking in all initiative, who 
can never become a factor in any political up- 
heaval, for in Turkey this can only be looked 
for from the military or the educated classes. 
If the Entente Powers ever counted on Tur- 
key's chronic state of starvation and lack of 
supplies coming to their aid in this war, they 
have made a sad mistake. Therefore in at- 
tempting to sketch in a few pages the condi- 
tions of life and the economic situation in Tur- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 109 

key, my aim is solely to bring to light the 
underlying Turkish methods, and the ethics 
and spirit of the Young Turkish Govern- 
ment. 

During the periods of the very acute bread 
crises, which occurred more than once, but 
notably in the beginning of 1916, some dozen 
men literally died of hunger daily in Constanti- 
nople alone. With my own eyes I have re- 
peatedly seen women collapsing from exhaus- 
tion in the streets. From many parts of the 
interior, particularly Syria, there were reliable 
reports of a still worse state of affairs. But 
even in more normal times there was always 
a difficulty in obtaining bread, for the means 
of communication in that vast and primitive 
land of Turkey are precarious at best, and it 
was no easy matter to get the grain trans- 
ported to the centres of consumption. 

Then in Constantinople there was a shortage 
not only of skilled labour, but of coal for mill- 
ing purposes. The result was that the towns- 
people only received a daily ration of a quarter 
of a kilogramme (about 8 oz. — not a quarter 
of an oka, which would be about 10 oz.) of 
bread, which was mostly of an indigestible and 



110 TWO WAR YEARS 

occasionally very doubtful quality — utterly 
uneatable by Europeans — although occasion- 
ally it was quite good though coarse. If the 
poor people in Constantinople wanted to sup- 
plement this very insufficient allowance, they 
could do so when things were in a flourishing 
condition at the price of about 2% or 3 piastres 
( 1 piastre = about 2% J. ) the English pound, 
and later 4 or 5 piastres. Even this was for 
the most part only procurable by clandestine 
means from soldiers who were usually willing 
to turn part of their bread ration into money. 

This is about all that can be said about the 
feeding of the people, for bread is by far the 
most important food of the Oriental, and the 
prices of the other foodstuffs soon reached ex- 
orbitant heights. What were the poor to feed 
on when rice, reckoned in English coinage, cost 
roughly from 3.s*. 2d. to 4^. 4cZ. an oka (about 
2% lb. ) , beans 2^. 4^d, the oka, meat 3^. to 45.^ 
and the cheapest sheep's cheese and olives, 
hitherto the most common Turkish condiment 
to eat with bread, rose to 3^. and Is, Sd. the 
oka? 

Wages, on the other hand, were ludicrously 
low. We may obtain some idea of the standard 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 111 

of living from the fact that the Government, 
who always favoured the soldiers, did not pay- 
more than 5 piastres (about 1^.) a day to the 
families of soldiers on active service. I have 
often wondered what the people really did eat, 
and I was never able to come to any satisfac- 
tory conclusion, although I often went to mar- 
ket myself to buy and see what other people 
bought. It is significant enough that just 
shortly before I left Constantinople — that is, 
a few weeks after the Turko-Bulgarian-Ger- 
man victories in Rumania and the fall of Bu- 
charest — the price of bread in the Turkish 
capital, in spite of the widely advertised "enor- 
mous supplies" taken in Rumania, rose still 
higher. 

I cannot speak from personal experience of 
what happened after Christmas 1916 in this 
connection, but everyone was quite convinced, 
in spite of the official report, that the harvest 
of 1916, despite the tremendous and praise- 
worthy efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture 
and the military authorities, would show a very 
marked decrease as a result of the mobilisation 
of agricultural labour, the requisitioning of 
implements, and the shortage of buffaloes. 



112 TWO WAR YEARS 

which, instead of ploughing fields, were pulling 
guns over the snow-covered uplands of Ar- 
menia. There was a very general idea that the 
harvest of 1917 would be a horrible catas- 
trophe. And yet I am fully convinced, and I 
must emphasise it again, that, in spite of agri- 
cultural disaster, Turkey will still go on as a 
military power. 

And now let us see what the Government 
did in connection with the food problem. At 
a comparatively early stage they followed Ger- 
many's example and introduced bread tickets, 
which were quite successful so long as the flour 
lasted. In the autumn of 1915 they took the 
organisation of the bread supply for large 
towns out of the hands of the municipalities, 
and gave it over to the War Office. They got 
Parliament to vote a large fund to buy up all 
available supplies of flour, and in view of the 
immense importance of bread as the chief 
means of nourishment of the masses, they de- 
cided to sell it at a very considerable loss to 
themselves, so that the price of the daily ra- 
tion (though not of the supplementary ration) 
remained very much as it had been in peace 
time. The Government always favoured the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 113 

purely Mohammedan quarters of the town so 
far as bread supply was concerned, and the 
people living in Fatih and other parts of Stam- 
boul were very much better off than the in- 
habitants of Grasco -European Pera. 

Then Talaat made speeches in the House 
on the food question in which he did all in his 
power to throw dust in the eyes of the starving 
population, but he did not really succeed in 
blinding anyone as to the true state of affairs. 
In February 1916, when there was practically 
a famine in the land, he even went so far as to 
declare in Parliament that the food supplies 
for the whole of Turkey had been so increased 
by enormous purchases in Rumania, that they 
were now fully assured for two years. 

It was no doubt with cynical enjoyment that 
the "Committee" of the Young Turks enlarged 
on the privations of the people in such pub- 
lications as the semi-official Tanin, in which 
the following wonderful sentiment appeared: 
"One can pass the night in relative brightness 
without oil in one's lamp if one thinks of the 
bright and glorious future that this war is pre- 
paring for Turkey!" 

One could have forgiven such cheap phrases 



114 TWO WAR YEARS 

if they had been a true, though possibly mis- 
guided, attempt to provide comfort in face of 
real want; but at the same time as such para- 
graphs were appearing in the Tanin and thou- 
sands of poor Turkish households had to spend 
the long winter nights without the slightest 
light, thousands of tons of oil were lying in 
Constantinople alone in the stores of the offi- 
cial accapareurs. 

This brings me to the second series of meas- 
ures taken by the Turkish Government to re- 
lieve the economic situation — those of a nega- 
tive nature. Their positive measures are pretty 
well exhausted when one has mentioned their 
treatment of the bread crisis. 

The question of requisitioning is one of the 
most important in Turkish life in wartime, and 
is not without its ludicrous side. In imitation 
of German war-time methods, either wrongly 
understood or wittingly misapplied by Oriental 
greed, the Turkish Government requisitioned 
pretty well everything in the food line or in 
the shape of articles of daily use that were sure 
to be scarce and would necessarily rise in price. 
But while in the civilised countries of Central 
Europe the supplies so requisitioned were 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 115 

sagely applied to the general good, the mem- 
bers of the "Committee of Union and Prog- 
ress" looked with fine contempt and the grim 
cynicism of arch-dictators on the privations 
and sufferings of the people so long as they 
did not actually starve, and used the supplies 
requisitioned for the personal enrichment of 
their clique. 

When I speak of requisitioning, I do not 
mean the necessary military carrying off of 
grain, cattle, vehicles, buffaloes, and horses, 
general equipment, and so on, in exchange for 
a scrap of paper to be redeemed after the war 
(of very doubtful value in view of Turkey's 
position) — I do not mean that, even though the 
way it was accomplished bled the country far 
more than was necessary, falling as it did in 
the country districts into the hands of igno- 
rant, brutal, and fanatical underlings, and in 
the town being carried out with every kind of 
refinement by the central authorities. Too 
often it was a means of violent "nationalisa- 
tion" and deprivation of property and 
rights exercised especially against Armenians, 
Greeks, and subjects of other Entente coun- 
tries. If there was a particularly nice villa or 



116 TWO WAR YEARS 

handsome estate belonging to someone who 
was not a Turk, soldiers were immediately 
billeted there under some pretext or other, and 
it was not long before these rough Anatolians 
had reduced everything to rack and ruin. 

I do not mean either the terrible damage to 
commercial life brought about by the way the 
military authorities, in complete disregard of 
agricultural interests, were always seizing rail- 
way waggons, and so completely laming all 
initiative on the part of farmers and merchants, 
whose goods were usually simply emptied out 
on the spot, exposed to ruin, or disposed of 
without any kind of compensation being given. 

What I do mean is the huge semi-official 
cornering of food, which must be regarded as 
typical of the Young Turks' idea of their offi- 
cial responsibility towards those for whom they 
exercised stewardship. 

The "Bakal Clique" (''provision mer- 
chants," "grocers") was known through the 
whole of Constantinople, and was keenly criti- 
cised by the much injured public. It was, first 
of all, under the official patronage of the city 
prefect, Ismet Bey, a creature of the Commit- 
tee; but later on, when they realised that dire 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE IIT 

necessity made a continuance of this system of 
cornering quite unthinkable, he was made the 
scapegoat, and his dismissal from office was 
freely commented on in the Committee news- 
papers as "an act of deliverance." The Com- 
mittee thought that they would thus throw 
dust in the eyes of the sorely-tried people of 
Constantinople. Hundreds of thousands of 
Turkish pounds were turned into cash in the 
shortest possible time by this semi-official syn- 
dicate, at the expense of the starving popula- 
tion, and found their way into the pockets of 
the administrators. 

That was how the Young Turkish parvenus 
were able to fulfil their one desire and wriggle 
their way into the best clubs, where they gam- 
bled away huge sums of money. The method 
was simple enough: whatever was eatable or 
useable, but could only be obtained by import 
from abroad, was ''taken charge of," and star- 
vation rations, which were simply ludicrously 
inadequate and quite insufficient for the needs 
of even the poorest household, were doled out 
by "vesikas" (the ticket system). 

The great stock of goods, however, was sold 
secretly at exorbitant prices by the creatures 



118 TWO WAR YEARS 

of the "Bakal Clique," who simply cornered 
the market. That is how it happened that in 
Constantinople, cut off as it was from the outer 
world and without imports, even at the end of 
1916, with a population of well over a million, 
there were still unlimited stores of everything 
available for those who could pay fancy prices, 
while by the beginning of 1915 those less well 
endowed with worldly goods had quite forgot- 
ten the meaning of comfort and the poor were 
starving with ample stores of everything still 
available. 

In businesses belonging to enemy subjects 
the system of requisitioning, of course, reached 
a climax, stores of all kinds worth thousands of 
pounds simply disappearing, without any rea- 
son being given for carrying them off, and 
nothing offered in exchange, but one of these 
famous "scraps of paper." Cases have been 
verified and were freely discussed in Pera of 
ladies' shoes and ladies' clothing even being 
requisitioned and turned into large sums of 
cash by the consequent rise in price. 

The profiteering of Ismet and company, who 
chose the specially productive centre of the 
capital for their system of usury, was not, how- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 119 

ever, by any means an isolated case of admin- 
istrative corruption, for exactly the same sys- 
tem of requisitioning, holding up and then re- 
selling under private management at as great 
a profit as possible, underlay and underlies the 
great semi-official Young Turkish commercial 
organisation, with branches throughout the 
whole country, known as the ''Djemiet" and 
under the distinguished patronage of Talaat 
himself. 

After Ismet Bey's fall, the "Djemiet" took 
over the supplying of the capital as well (with 
the exception of bread). We will speak else- 
where of this great organisation, which is estab- 
lished not only for war purposes, but serves 
towards the nationalisation of economic life. 
So far as the system of requisitioning is con- 
cerned, it comes into the picture through its 
firm opposition to German merchants who 
were trying to buy up stores of food and raw 
materials from their ally Turkey. The in- 
trigues and counter-intrigues on both sides 
sometimes had most remarkable results. 

One of the really bright sides of life in Con- 
stantinople in wartime was the amusement one 
extracted from the silent and desperate war 



120 TWO WAR YEARS 

continually being waged by the many well- 
fed gentlemen of the "Z.E.G." {''Zentralein- 
kaufsgesellschaft/' "Central Purchasing Com- 
mission") and their minions who tried to rob 
Turkey of foodstuffs and raw material for the 
benefit of Germany, against the "Djemiet" 
and more particularly the Quartermaster-Gen- 
eral, Ismail Hakki Pasha, that wooden-legged, 
enormously wealthy representative of the neo- 
Turkish spirit — he was the most perfect blend 
of Oriental politeness and narrow-minded de- 
cision to do exactly the opposite of what he had 
promised. On the Turkish side, the determina- 
tion to safeguard the interests of the Army, 
and in the case of the "Djemiet" the effort not 
to let any foodstuffs out of Germany — a stand- 
point that has at last found expression in a 
formal prohibition of all export — then the 
quest of personal enrichment on the part of the 
great ^'Clique"; on the German side, the in- 
satiable hunger for everything Turkey could 
provide that had been lacking for a long time 
in Germany: the whole thing was a wonder- 
fully variegated picture of mutual intrigue. 

The gentlemen of the "Z.E.G.," after 
months of inactivity spent in reviling the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 121 

Turks and studying Young Turkish and other 
morals and manners by frequenting all the 
pleasure resorts in the place, managed at last 
to get the exports of raw materials set on the 
right road, and so it came about that the fabu- 
lous sums in German money that had to be 
put into circulation in payment of these goods, 
in spite of Turkey's indebtedness to Germany, 
led to a very considerable depreciation in the 
value of the Mark even in Turkey for some 
time. 

But until the understanding as to exports 
was finally arrived at, there were many dra- 
matic events in Constantinople, culminating in 
the Turks re-requisitioning, with the help of 
armed detachments, stores already paid for 
by Germany and lying in the warehouses of 
the "Z.E.G." and the German Bank! 

On the financial side, apart from Turkey's 
enormous debt to Germany, the wonderful at- 
tempt at a reform and standardisation of the 
coinage in the middle of May 1916 is worthy 
of mention. The reform, which was a simpli- 
fication of huge economic value of the tre- 
mendously complicated money system and in- 
troducing a theoretical gold unit, must be re- 



122 TWO WAR YEARS 

garded chiefly as a war measure to prevent the 
rapid deterioration of Turkish paper money. 

This last attempt, as was obvious after a 
few months' trial, was entirely unsuccessful, 
and even hastened the fall of paper money, 
for the population soon discovered at the back 
of these drastic measures the thinly veiled anx- 
iety of the Government lest there should be 
a further deterioration. Dire punishments, 
such as the closing down of money-changers' 
businesses and arraignment before a military 
court for the slightest offence, were meted out 
to anyone found guilty of changing gold or 
even silver for paper. 

In November 1916, however, it was an open 
secret that, in spite of all these prohibitions, 
there was no difficulty in the inland provinces 
and in Syria and Palestine in changing a gold 
pound for two or more paper pounds. In still 
more unfrequented spots no paper money 
would be accepted, so that the whole trade of 
the country simply came to a standstill. Even 
in Constantinople at the beginning of Decem- 
ber 1916, paper stood to gold as 100 to 175. 

The Anatolian population still went gaily 
on, burying all the available silver medjidiehs 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 123 

and even nickel piastres in their clay pots in 
the ground, because being simple country folk 
they could not understand, as the Government 
with all its prayers and threats were so anx- 
ious they should, that throughout Turkey and 
in the greater and mightier and equally vic- 
torious Germany, guaranteed paper money 
was really much better than actual coins, and 
was just as valuable as gold! The people, too, 
could not but remember what had happened 
with the "Kaime" after the Turko-Russian 
war, when thousands who had believed in the 
assurances of the Government suddenly found 
themselves penniless. In Constantinople it 
was a favourite joke to take one of the new 
pound, half-pound, or quarter-pound notes is- 
sued under German paper, not gold, guarantee 
and printed only on one side and say, "This 
[pointing to the right side] is the present value, 
and that [blank side] will be the value on the 
conclusion of peace." 

Even those who were better informed, how- 
ever, and sat at the receipt of custom, did ex- 
actly the same as these stupid Anatolian coun- 
try-people; no idea of patriotism prevented 
them from collecting everything metal they 



124 TWO WAR YEARS 

could lay their hands on, and, in spite of all 
threats of punishment^ — which could never 
overtake them! — paying the highest price in 
paper money for every gold piece they could 
get. Their argument was: ''One must of 
course have something to live on in the time 
directly following the conclusion of peace." In 
ordinary trade and commerce, filthy, torn 
paper notes, down to a paper piastre, came 
more and more to be practically the only ex- 
change. 

A discerning Turk said to me once: "It 
would be a very good plan sometime to have 
the police search these great men for bullion 
every evening on their return from the official 
exchanges. That would be more to the point 
than any reform in the coinage!" 

Those who could not get gold, bought 
roubles, which were regarded as one of the 
very best speculations going, until one day the 
Turkish Government, in their annoyance at 
some Russian victory, suddenly deported to 
Anatolia a rich Greek banker of the name of 
Vlasdari, who was accused of having specu- 
lated in roubles, which of course gave them the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 125 

double benefit of getting rid of a Greek and 
seizing his beautiful estate in Pera. 

Only the greatest optimists were deceived 
into believing that it was a profitable trans- 
action to buy Austrian paper money at the 
fabulously low price the Austrian Krone had 
reached against the Turkish pound, which was 
really neither politically nor financially in any 
better a state. The members of the "Commit- 
tee of Union and Progress" had of course 
shipped their gold off to Switzerland long ago. 



126 TWO WAK YEARS 



CHAPTER VI 

German propaganda and ethics — The unsuccessful 
"Holy War" and the German Government — "The 
Holy War" a crime against civilisation, a chimera, 
a farce — Underhand dealings — The German Em- 
bassy the dupe of adventurers — The morality of 
German Press representatives — A trusty servant of 
the German Embassy — Fine official distinctions of 
morality — The German conception of the rights of 
individuals. 

Now that we have given a rough sketch of the 
main events of the war as it affected the eco- 
nomic life of the people, and have devoted a 
chapter to that sinister crime, the Armenian 
persecutions, we shall leave the Young Turks 
for a moment and turn to an examination of 
German propaganda methods. 

It is a very painful task for a German who 
does not profess to be a "World Politician," 
but really thinks in terms of true ''world-poli- 
tics," to deal with the many intrigues and 
machinations of our Government in their rela- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 127 

tion to the so-called "Holy War" (Arab. D ji- 
had) , where in their quest of a vain illusion they 
stooped to the very lowest means. Practically 
all their hopes in that direction have been sadly 
shattered. Their costly, unscrupulous, thor- 
oughly unmoral efforts against European civil- 
isation in Mohammedan countries have re- 
sulted in the terrific counter-stroke of the de- 
fection of the Arabs and the foundation of a 
purely Arabian Chaliphate under English pro- 
tection. Thus England has already won a 
brilliant victory against Germany and Turkey 
in spite of Gallipoli and Kut-el-Amara, al- 
though it seems probable that even these will 
be wiped out by greater deeds on the part of 
the Entente before long. One could not have 
a better example of Germany's total inability 
to succeed in the sphere of world-politics. 

The so-called "Holy War," if it had suc- 
ceeded, would have been one of the greatest 
crimes against human civilisation that even 
Germany has on her conscience, remembering 
as we do her recent ruthless "f rightfulness" at 
sea, and her attempt to set Mexico and the 
Japanese against the land of most modern 
civilisation and of greatest liberty. A success- 



128 TWO WAR YEARS 

ful ''Djihad" spreading to all the lands of 
Islam would have set back by years all that 
civilisation so patiently and so painfully won; 
it would not have been at all comparable with 
the Entente's use of coloured troops in Europe 
which Germany deprecated so loudly, for in the 
Holy War it would have been a case of letting 
the wildest fanaticism loose against the armies 
of law and order and civilisation; in the case 
of the Entente it was part of a purely military 
action on the part of England and France, 
who held under their sway all the inhabitants, 
coloured and otherwise, of those Colonial re- 
gions from which troops were sent to Europe 
and to which they will return. 

But the attempt against colonial civilisation 
did not succeed. The "D jihad," proclaimed 
as it was by the Turanian pseudo-Chaliph and 
violently anti-Entente, was doomed to failure 
from the very start from its obvious artificial- 
ity. It was a miserable farce, or rather a tragi- 
comedy, the present ending of which, namely 
the defection of the Arabian Chaliphate, is the 
direct contrary of what had been aimed at with 
such fanatical urgency and the use of such im- 
moral propaganda. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 129 

The attempt to "unloose" the Holy War 
was due primarily to the most absurd illusions. 
It would seem that in Germany, the land of 
science, the home of so many eminent doctors 
of research, even the scholars have been at- 
tacked by that disease of being dazzled by wild 
political illusions, or surely, knowing the coun- 
tries of Islam outside-in as they must, they 
would long ago have raised their voices against 
such arrant folly. It would seem that all her 
inherent knowledge, all her studies, have been 
of little or no avail to Germany, so that mis- 
take after mistake has been committed in the 
realm of world politics. It may be said that 
Germany, even if she were doubtful of the is- 
sue, should still not have left untried this means 
of crippling her opponents. To that I can only 
reply by pointing to the actual position of af- 
fairs, well known to Germany, not only in 
English, but also in French and Russian Is- 
lamic colonial territory, which should have ren- 
dered the "D jihad" entirely and absolutely out 
of the question. 

Let us take for example Egypt, French 
North- West Africa, and Russian Turkestan, 
not to speak of the masterly English colonial 



130 TWO WAR YEARS 

rule in India, which has now been tested and 
tried for centuries. Anyone who has ever seen 
Egypt with the area under culture practically 
doubled under modern English rule by the help 
of every kind of technical contrivance for the 
betterment of existing conditions, and the skil- 
ful utilisation of all available means at an ex- 
pense of millions of pounds, with its needy 
population given an opportunity to earn a liv- 
ing wage and even wealth through a lucrative 
cultivation of the land under conditions that 
are a paradise compared with what they were 
under the Turkish rule of extortion and des- 
potism — anyone who has seen that must have 
looked from the very beginning with a very 
doubtful eye on Germany's and Turkey's illu- 
sions of stirring up these well-doing people 
against their rulers. 

The same thing occurs again in the extended 
territory of North- West Africa from the Atlas 
lands to the Guinea coast and Lake Chad, 
where France, as I know from personal expe- 
rience, stands on a high level of colonial excel- 
lence, developing all the resources of the coun- 
try with consummate skill, shaping her ''em- 
pire coloniaT' more and more into a shining 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 131 

gem in the crown of colonial endeavour, and, 
as I can testify from my own observations in 
Morocco, Senegal, the Niger, and the Interior 
of the Guinea territories of the "A.O.F." ( Af- 
rique Occidentale Fran^aise), capturing the 
hearts of the whole population by her essential 
culture, and, last but not least, winning the 
Mohammedans by her clever Islam policy. 

That, finally, Russia, at any rate from the 
psychological standpoint, is perhaps the best 
coloniser of Further Asia, even German text- 
books on colonial policy admit unreservedly, 
and the glowing conditions that she has 
brought about especially in the basin of Ferg- 
hana in Turkestan by the introduction of the 
flourishing and lucrative business of cotton- 
growing are known to everyone. Only poli- 
ticians of the most wildly fantastic type, who 
see everywhere what they want to see, could 
believe that in this war the Turkish "Turan- 
istic" bait would ever have any effect in Rus- 
sian Central Asia, or make its inhabitants now 
living in security, peace, and well-being wish 
back again the conditions which prevailed 
under the Emirs of Samarkand, Khiva, and 
Bokhara. But Germany, who should have been 



132 TWO WAR YEARS 

well informed if anyone was, believed all these 
fantastic impossibilities. 

One could let it pass with a slight feeling of 
irritation against Germany if it were merely a 
case of the failure of the "Djihad." But un- 
fortunately the propaganda, as stupid as it 
was unsuccessful, exercised in this connection, 
will be written down for all time as one of the 
blackest and most despicable marks against 
Germany's account in this war. In Turkey 
alone, the underhand manipulation for the un- 
loosing of the ''Holy War" and the German 
Press propaganda so closely allied with it, in- 
deed the whole way in which the German cause 
in the East was represented journalistically 
throughout the war, are subjects full of the 
saddest, most biting irony, to sympathise with 
which must lower every German who has lived 
in the Turkish capital in the eyes of the whole 
civilised world. 

In order to demonstrate the role played in 
this affair by the German Embassy at Con- 
stantinople I will not make an exhaustive sur- 
vey but simply confine myself to a few epi- 
sodes and outstanding features. An eminent 
German Red Cross doctor, clear-sighted and 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 133 

reliable, who had many tales to tell of what he 
had seen in the "Caucasus" campaign, said to 
me one evening, as we sat together at a prom- 
enade concert : "Do you see that man in Prus- 
sian major's uniform going past? I met him 
twice in Erzerum last winter. The man was 
nothing but an employee in a merchant's busi- 
ness in Baku, and had learnt Russian there. 
He has never done military service. When war 
broke out, he hurried to the Embassy in Pera 
and offered his services to stir up the Geor- 
gians and other peoples of the Caucasus 
against Russia. Of course he got full powers 
to do what he wanted, and guns and ammuni- 
tion and piles of propaganda pamphlets were 
placed at his disposal so that he might carry 
on his work from the frontier of the then still 
neutral Turkey. Whole chests full of good 
gold coins were sent to him to be distributed 
confidentially for propaganda purposes; of 
course he was his own most confidential friend ! 
He went back to Erzerum without having won 
a single soul for the cause of the *Djihad.' 
That has not prevented his living as a 'grand 
seigneur,' for the Embassy are not yet daunted, 
and now the fellow struts about in a major's 



134 



TWO WAR YEARS 



uniform, lent to him, although he has never 
been a soldier, so that the cause may gain still 
more prestige." 

Xumerous examples of similar measures 
might be cited, and instances without number 
given, of the German Embassy being made the 
dupe of greedy adventurers who treated them 
as an inexhaustible source of gold. First one 
y/ould appear on the scene who announced 
himself as the one man to cope with Afghani- 
stan, then another would come along on his 
way to Persia and play the great man "on a 
special mission" for a time in Pera while money 
belonging to the German Empire would find 
its way into all sorts of low haunts. And so 
things went on for two years imtil, with the 
Arabian catastrophe, even the eyes of the great 
diplomatic optimists of Ayas-Pasha might 
have been opened. 

I will only mention here how even a hona fide 
connoisseur of the East like Baron von Op- 
penlieim, who had already made tours of con- 
siderable value for research purposes right 
across the Arabian Peninsula, and so should 
have known better than to share these false illu- 
sions, doled out thousands of marks from his 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 135 

own pocket — and millions from the Treas- 
m-y! — to stir up the tribes to take part in the 
"Djiliad," and how he returned to Pera from 
his propaganda tour with a real Bedouin 
beard, and, still unabashed, took over the con- 
trol of the German Embassy's "News Bu- 
reau," which kept up these much-derided war 
telegraph and picture offices known in Pera 
and elsewhere by the non-German populace 
as sacs de mensonges^ and which flooded the 
whole of the East with waggon loads of 
pamphlets in every conceivable tongue — in fact 
these, with guns and ammunition, formed the 
chief load of the bi-weekly "culture-bringing" 
Balkan train! 

I will only cite the one example of the far- 
famed Mario Passarge — a real Apache to look 
at. With his friend Frobenius, the ethnog- 
rapher and German agent, well known to me 
personally from French West Africa for his 
liking for absinthe and negro women and his 
Teutonic brusqueness emphasised in compari- 
son with the kindly, helpful French officials, 
as well as by hearsay from many scandalous 
tales, Passarge undertook that disastrous ex- 
pedition to tlie Abyssinians which failed so 



136 TWO WAR YEARS 

lamentably owing to the Italians, and then 
after its collapse came to Turkey as special 
correspondent of the Vossische Zeitung and 
managed to swindle his way through Mace- 
donia with a false Italian passport to Greece, 
where he wrote sensational reports for his won- 
derful newspaper about the atrocities and low 
morale of SarraiFs army — the same newspaper 
that had made itself the laughing-stock of the 
whole of Europe, and at the same time had 
managed to get the German Government to 
pursue for two years the shadow of a separate 
peace with Russia, by publishing a marvellous 
series of "Special Reports via Stockholm," on 
conditions in Russia that were nothing but a 
tissue of lies inspired by blind Jewish hate; if 
a tithe of them had been true, Russia would 
have gone under long ago. 

I need not repeat my own opinion on aU the 
machinations of the German Embassy, but I 
will simply give you word for word what a 
German Press agent in Constantinople ( I will 
mention no names) once said to me: "It is 
unbelievable," he declared, "what a mob of 
low characters frequent the German Embassy 
now. The scum of the earth, people who would 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 137 

never have dared before the war to have been 
seen on the pavements of Ayas-Pasha, have 
now free entry. Any day you can see some 
doubtful-looking character accosting the por- 
ter at the Embassy, whispering something in 
his ear, and then being ushered down the steps 
to where the propaganda department, the news 
bureau, has its quarters. There he gives won- 
derful assurances of what he can do, and prom- 
ises to stir up some Mohammedan people for 
the "Djihad." Then he waits a while in the 
ante-room, and is finally received by the au- 
thorities ; but the next time he comes to the Em- 
bassy he walks in through the well-carpeted 
main entrance, and requests an audience with 
the Ambassador or other high official, and we 
soon find him comfortably equipped and set- 
ting off on a 'special mission' as the confiden- 
tial servant of the German Embassy." But 
even the recognition of these truths has not 
prevented this journalist from eating from the 
crib of the German Embassy! 

I cannot leave this disagreeable subject 
without making some mention of a type that 
does more than anything to throw light on the 
morale of this German propaganda. Every- 



138 TWO WAR YEAHS 

one in Constantinople knows — or rather knew, 
for he has now feathered his nest comfortably 
and departed to Germany with his money — 
Mehmed Zekki "Bey," the publisher and chief 
editor of the military paper Die Nationalver- 
teidigung and its counterpart La Defense, 
published daily in French but representative 
of Young Turkish-German interests. Hun- 
dreds of those who know Zekki also know that 
he used to be called "Capitaine Nelken y Wald- 
berg." Fewer know that "Nelken" alone 
would have been more in accordance with fact. 
I will relate the history of this individual, 
as I know it from the mouths of reliable in- 
formants — ^the members of the Embassy and 
the Consulate. Nelken, a Roumanian Jew, 
a shopkeeper by trade, had been several times 
in prison for bankruptcy and fraud, and at 
last fled from Roumania. He took refuge in 
the Turkish capital, where he continued his 
business and married a Greek wife. Here 
again he became bankrupt, as is only too clear 
from the public notice of restoration in the 
Constantinople newspapers, when his lucra- 
tive political activity as the champion of 
Krupp's, of the German cause and "the holy 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 139 

German war," as much a purely pan-Germanic 
as Islamic affair, provided him with the where- 
withal to pay off his former disreputable 
debts. 

To go back to his history — with money won 
by fraud in his pocket, he deserted his wife and 
went off, no doubt having made a thorough 
and most professional study of the subject in 
the low haunts of Per a, as a white-slave trader 
to the Argentine, and then — I rely for my in- 
formation on an official of the German Con- 
sulate in Pera — set up as proprietor of a 
brothel in Buenos Ayres. Then, as often hap- 
pens, the Argentine special police took him 
into their service, thinking, on the principle of 
"setting a thief to catch a thief," that he would 
have special experience for the post. Grounds 
enough there for him to add on the second 
name of his falsified passport "Nelken y Wald- 
berg" and to call himself in Europe a "Capi- 
taine de la Gendarmerie" from the Argentine. 

From there he went to Cairo and edited a 
little private paper called Les Petites Nou- 
velles Egyptiennes, For repeated extortion 
he was sentenced to one year's imprisonment, 
but unfortunately only in contumaciam, for he 



140 TWO WAR YEARS 

had already fled the country, not, however, be- 
fore he had been publicly smacked on the face 
in the "Flasch" beer garden without offering 
satisfaction as an "Argentine General" should 
— a performance that was later repeated in 
every detail in Toklian's Restaurant in Con- 
stantinople. 

He told me once that he had been sentenced 
in this way because, on an understanding with 
the then German Diplomatic Agent in Cairo, 
von Miquel, he had attacked Lord Cromer's 
policy sharply, and that his patron von Miquel 
had given him the timely hint to leave Egypt. 
I will leave it to one's imagination to discover 
how much truth there was in this former broth- 
el-keeper's connection with official German 
"world-politics" and high diplomacy. From 
what I have seen personally since, I believe 
that Zekki, alias Nelken, was probably speak- 
ing the truth in this case, although it is cer- 
tainly a fact that in German circles in Cairo 
at that time ordinary extortion was recognised 
as being punishable by imprisonment for a 
considerable length of time. 

Nelken then returned to Constantinople 
and devoted himself with unflagging energy to 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 141 

his previous business of agent. He turned to 
the Islamic faith and became a citizen of the 
Ottoman Empire because he found it more 
profitable so to do, and could thus escape from 
his former liabilities. Then in spite of lack 
of means, he managed to found a military 
newspaper, which, however, soon petered out. 
Nelken became Mehmed Zekki and a journal- 
ist, and of course called himself "Bey." 

Up to this point the history of this individual 
is nothing but a characteristic extract from life 
as it is lived by hundreds of rogues in the East. 
But now we come to something which is almost 
unbelievable and which leads me to give cre- 
dence to his version of his relations with von 
Miquel, which after all only shows more clear- 
ly than ever that German "world-politics" 
are not above making use of the scum of the 
earth for their intrigues. In full knowledge 
of this man's whole black past — as Dr. Weber 
of the German Embassy himself told me — the 
German Embassy with the sanction of the Im- 
perial Government (this I know from letters 
Zekki showed me in great glee from the For- 
eign Office and the War Office) appointed this 
fellow, whom all Pera said they would not 



142 TWO WAR YEARS 

touch with gloves on or with the tongs, to be 
their confidential agent with a large monthly 
honorarium and to become a pillar of "the 
German cause" in the East. And it could not 
even be said in extenuation that the man had 
any great desire or any wonderful vocation to 
represent Germany, for — as the Embassy of- 
ficial said to me — "We knew that Zekki was 
a dangerous character and rather inclined to 
the Entente at the outbreak of war, so we de- 
cided to win him over by giving him a salary 
rather than drive him into the enemy's camp." 
So it simply comes to this, that Germany buys 
a bankrupt, a blackmailer, a procurer, a bro- 
thel-keeper with cash to fight her "Holy War" 
for her! 

As publisher of the Defense Zekki received 
a large salary from Germany, one from Aus- 
tria, afterwards cut down not from any ex- 
cess of moral sense, but simply from excess of 
economy, and a very considerable sum from 
Krupp's. As representative of German inter- 
ests he did all he could to propitiate the Young 
Turks by the most fulsome flattery, and more 
recently he was pushing hard to get on the 
Committee of Union and Progress. But the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 143 

Turks jibbed at what the German Embassy 
had brought on themselves — seeing Zekki 
''Bey" moving about their sacred halls with 
the most imposing nonchalance and conde- 
scension. Zekki himself once complained to 
me bitterly that in spite of his having pre- 
sented Enver Pasha with a valuable clock 
worth eighty Turkish pounds which Enver had 
accepted with pleasure, he would not even an- 
swer a written request from Zekki craving an 
audience with him. (This, incidentally, is a 
most excellent example of the working of En- 
ver's mind, a megalomaniac as greedy as he 
was proud.) 

The military director of the Turkish Press 
said to me once: "We are only waiting for 
the first 'gaffe' in his paper to get this filthy 
creature hunted out of his lair," and one day 
when through carelessness a small uncensored 
and really quite harmless military notice ap- 
peared in print (everything is submitted to 
the censor), the Turkish Government gave it 
short shrift indeed, and banned sine die this 
"Ottoman" paper which lived by Krupp and 
the German trade advertisements, and had be- 
come an advocate of the German Embassy, 



144 TWO WAR YEARS 

because it was paid in good solid cash for it. 
The paper was replaced by a new one in Turk- 
ish hands, called JLe Soir, 

I could go on talking for ages from most 
intimate personal knowledge about this man, 
superb in his own way. His doings were not 
without a certain comic side which amused 
while it aggravated one. I could mention, 
for example, his great lawsuit in Germany in 
1916, in which he brought an accusation of 
libel against some German who had called him 
a blackmailer and a criminal who had been 
repeatedly punished. He managed to win the 
lawsuit — that is, the defenders had to pay a 
fine of twenty marks, because the evidence 
brought against Zekki could not be followed 
up to Egypt on account of England's suprem- 
acy on the sea, and also no doubt because the 
interests of Krupp and the German Embassy 
could not have this cherished blossom of Ger- 
man propaganda disturbed! So for him at 
any rate the lack of "freedom of the seas" he 
had so often raged about in his leading articles 
was a very appreciable advantage. 

The last time I remember seeing the man he 
was engaged in an earnest tete-a-tete about the 



* IN CONSTANTINOPLE 145 

propagation of German political interests by 
means of arms with the Nationalist Reichstag 
deputy, Dr. Streesemann, a representative of 
the German heavy goods trade and of German 
jingoism who had hastened to Constantinople 
for the furtherance of German culture. Most 
significantly, no doubt in remembrance of his 
days in Buenos Ayres, Zekki had chosen for 
this interview the most private room of the 
Hotel Moderne, a pension with a bar where 
sect could be had; and the worthy represent- 
ative of the German people, probably nothing 
loth to have a change from his eternal "Pan- 
German" diet, accepted his invitation with 
alacrity. I followed the two gentlemen to 
make my own investigations, and I certainly 
got as much amusement, although in a dif- 
ferent sense, as one usually does in such 
haunts. It was really most entertaining to 
watch Nelken the ex-Jew and Young Turk, 
with his fez on his head, nodding jovially to all 
the German officers at the neighbouring tables, 
and settling the affairs of the realm with this 
Pan-German representative of the people. 

I trust my readers will forgive me if, in 
spite of the distaste I feel at having to write 



146 TWO WAR YEARS 

this unsavoury chapter about German Press 
representatives and those in high diplomatic 
authority who commission them, I relate one 
more episode of a like character before I close. 
One of these writers employed in the service 
of the German Embassy had done one of his 
female employees an injury which cannot be 
repeated here. His colleague — out of profes- 
sional jealousy, the other said — gave evidence 
against him under oath at the German Con- 
sulate, and the other brought a charge of per- 
jury against him. The German Consulate, in 
order not to lose such a trusty champion of 
the German cause for a trifle like the wounded 
honour of a mere woman — an Armenian to 
boot! — simply suppressed the whole case, al- 
though all Pera was speaking about it. 

Against this we have the case later on of a 
German journalist, most jealous of German 
interests, who had a highly important docu- 
ment stolen out of his desk with false keys by 
one of his clerks in the pay of the Young Turk- 
ish Committee. The document was the copy 
of a very confidential report addressed to high 
official quarters in Germany, in which there 
were some rather more uncomplimentary re- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 147 

marks about Enver and Talaat than appeared 
in the version for public consumption. An 
Embassy less notoriously cowardly than the 
German one would simply have shielded their 
man in consideration of the fact that the re- 
port was never meant for publication and of 
the reprehensible way it had been stolen and 
made public. But our chicken-hearted diplo- 
mats allowed him to be dismissed in disgrace 
by the Turks, and so practically gave their of- 
ficial sanction to the meanest Oriental methods 
of espionage. 

I have, however, now come to the conclu- 
sion from information I have received that 
German cowardice in this case probably had 
a background of hypocrisy and malice, for this 
same journalist had spoken with remarkable 
freedom, not indeed as a pro-Englander, but 
in contrast to German and Turkish narrow- 
mindedness, of how well he had been treated 
by the English authorities, and particularly 
General Maxwell in the exercise of his pro- 
fession in Cairo, where he had been allowed 
for fully five weeks, after the outbreak of war, 
to edit a German newspaper. (I have seen 
the numbers myself and wondered at the al- 



148 TWO WAR YEARS 

most incredible liberality of the English cen- 
sorship.) Instead of being sent to Malta he 
had been treated most fairly and kindly and 
given every opportunity to get away safely 
to Syria. Of course the narration of events 
like these were rather out of place in our "God 
Punish England" time, and it was no doubt 
on account of this, apart from all cowardice, 
that the German Embassy made their fine dis- 
stinctions between personal and political mo- 
rality in the case of their Press representa- 
tive. 

We have spoken of German propaganda for 
the "Holy War," as carried out by individuals 
as well as by pamphlets and the Press. The 
Turkish capital saw a very appreciable amount 
of this in the shape of wandering adventurers 
and printed paper. Several thousand Alge- 
rian, Tunisian, French West African, Russian 
Tartar, and Turkestan prisoners of war of 
Mohammedan religion from the German in- 
ternment camps were kept for weeks in Per a 
and urged by the German Government in de- 
fiance of all the laws of the peoples to join the 
"D jihad" against their own rulers. 

They were told that they would have the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 149 

great honour of being presented to the Cahph 
in Stamboul; as devout Mohammedans they 
could of course not find much to object to in 
that. A wonderfully attractive picture was 
painted for them of the delights of settling in 
the flourishing lands of the East, and living 
free of expense instead of starving in prison 
under the rod of German non-commissioned 
officers till the far-distant conclusion of peace. 
One can well imagine how such marvellous 
conjuring tricks would appeal to these poor 
fellows. 

They have repeatedly told me that they had 
been promised to be allowed to settle in Tur- 
key without any mention being made of using 
them again as soldiers. But once on the way 
to Constantinople there was no further ques- 
tion of asking them what their opinion was of 
what was being done to them. They were 
simply treated as Turkish voluntary soldiers 
and sent off to the Front, to Armenia, and 
the Irak. How far they were used as real front- 
line soldiers or in service behind the lines I do 
not know; what I do know is that they left 
Constantinople in as great numbers as they 
came from Germany, armed with rifles and 



150 TWO WAR YEARS 

fully equipped for service in the field. One 
can therefore guess how many of them became 
"settlers" as they had been promised. Several 
days running in the early simamer of 1916 I 
saw them being marched off in the direction of 
the Haidar-Pasha station on the Anatolian 
Railway. They were headed by a Turkish 
band, but on not one single face of all these 
serried ranks did I see the slightest spark of 
enthusiasm, and the German soldiers and offi- 
cers escorting each separate section were not 
exactly calculated to leave the impression with 
the public that these were zealots fighting vol- 
untarily for their faith who could not get fast 
enough out to the Front to be shot or hanged 
by their former masters ! 

In her system of recruiting in the newly 
founded kingdom of Poland, Germany demon- 
strated even more clearly of what she was 
capable in this direction. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 151 



CHAPTER VII 

Young Turkish nationalism — One-sided abolition of ca- 
pitulations — Anti-foreign efforts at emancipation — 
Abolition of foreign languages — German simplicity 
— The Turkification of commercial life — Unmistak- 
able intellectual improvement as a result of the war 
— Trade policy and customs tariff — National pro- 
duction — The founding of new businesses in Tur- 
key — Germany supplanted — German starvation — 
Capitulations or full European control? — The colo- 
nisation and forcible Turkification of Anatolia — 
"The properties of people who have been dispatched 
elsewhere" — The "Mohadjirs" — Greek persecutions 
just before the Great War — The "discovery" of An- 
atolia^ the nucleus of the Ottoman Empire — Turkey 
finds herself at last — Anatolian dirt and decay — 
The "Greater Turkey" and the purely Turkish Tur- 
key — Cleavage or concentration? 

From the Germans we now turn again to the 
Turks, to try to fathom the exact mentality 
of the Young Turks during the great war, and 
to discover what were the intellectual sources 
for their various activities. 



152 TWO WAR YEARS 

To give a better idea of the whole position 
I will just preface my remarks by stating a 
few of the outstanding features of the pres- 
ent Young Turkish Government and their 
dependents. Their first and chief character- 
istic is hostility to foreigners, but this does not 
prevent them from making every possible use 
of their ally Germany, or from appropriating 
in every walk of life anything European, be 
it a matter of technical skill, government, civil- 
isation, that they consider might be profitable. 
Secondly they are possessed of an unbounded 
store of jingoism, which has its origin in Pan- 
Turhism with its ruling idea of "Turanism." 
Pan-Turkism, which seems to be the govern- 
ing passion of all the leading men of the day, 
finds expression in two directions. Outwardly 
it is a constant striving for a "Greater Tur- 
key," a movement that for a large part in its 
essence, and certainly in its territorial aims, 
runs parallel with the "Holy War"; inwardly 
it is a fanatical desire for a general Turkifica- 
tion which finds outlet in political nationalistic 
measures, some of criminal barbarity, others 
partaking of the nature of modern reforms, be- 
ginning with the language regulations and "in- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 153 

ternal colonisation" and ending in the Armen- 
ian persecutions. 

It is worthy of note that of the two intel- 
lectual sources of the "Holy War," namely 
Turanism — which one might reverse and call 
an extended form of Old-Turkism — ^and Pan- 
Islamism, the men of the "Committee for 
Unity and Progress" have only made logical 
though unsuccessful use of the former, al- 
though theoretically speaking they recognise 
the value of the latter as well. While Turkish 
race-fanaticism, which finds practical outlet in 
Turanistic ideas, is still the intellectual back- 
bone of official Turkey to-day and has to be 
broken by the present war, the Young Turk- 
ish Islam policy is already completely bank- 
rupt and can therefore be studied here dis- 
passionately in all its aspects. We propose 
to treat the matter in some detail. 

All New- Turkish Nationalistic efforts at 
emancipation had as first principle the aboli- 
tion of Capitulations. The whole Young 
Turkish period we have here under review is 
therefore to be dated from that day, shortly 
before Turkey's entry into the war, when that 
injunction was flung overboard which Europe 



154 TWO WAR YEARS 

had anxiously placed for the protection of 
the interests of Europeans on a State but too 
little civilised. It was Turkey herself that did 
this after having curtly refused the Entente 
offer to remove the Capitulations as a reward 
for Turkey's remaining neutral. Germany, 
who was equally interested in the existence or 
non-existence of Capitulations, never men- 
tioned this painful subject to her ally for a 
very long time, and it was 1916 before she 
formally recognised the abolition of Capitula- 
tions, long after she had lost all hold on Tur- 
key in that direction. 

As early as summer 1915 there were clear 
outward indications in the streets of Constan- 
tinople of a smouldering Nationalism ready to 
break out at any moment. Turkey, under the 
leadership of Talaat Bey, pursued her course 
along the well-trodden paths, and the first 
sphere in which there was evidence of an at- 
tempt at forcible Turkification was the lan- 
guage. Somewhere toward the end of 1915 
Talaat suddenly ordered the removal of all 
French and English inscriptions, shop signs, 
etc., even in the middle of European Pera. In 
tramcars and at stopping-places the French 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 155 

text was blocked out ; boards with public police 
warnings in French were either removed alto- 
gether or replaced by unreadable Turkish 
scrawls; the street indications were simply 
abolished. The authorities apparently thought 
it preferable that the Levantine public should 
get into the wrong tramcar, should break their 
legs getting out, pick flowers in the parks and 
wander round helplessly in a maze of unnamed 
streets rather than that the spirit of forcible 
Turkification should make even the least sac- 
rifice to comfort. 

Of the thousand inhabitants of Pera, not ten 
can read Turkish; but under the pressure of 
the official order and for fear of brutal assault 
or some kind of underhand treatment in case 
of non-compliance, the inhabitants really sur- 
passed themselves, and before one could turn, 
all the names over the shops had been painted 
over and replaced by wonderful Turkish char- 
acters that looked like decorative shields or 
something of the kind painted in the red and 
white of the national colours. If one had not 
noted the entrance to the shop and the look of 
the window very carefully, one might wander 
helplessly up and down the Grand Rue de 



156 TWO WAR YEARS 

Pera if one wanted to buy something in a par- 
ticular shop. 

But the German, as simple-minded as ever 
where political matters were concerned, was 
highly delighted in spite of the extraordinary 
difficulty of communal life. ''Away with 
French and English," he would shout. "God 
punish England; hurrah, our Turkish broth- 
ers are helping us and favouring the extension 
of the German language!" 

The answer to these pan-German expansion 
politicians and language fanatics, whose spirit- 
ual home was round the beer-tables of the 
"Teutonia," was provided by a second decree 
of Talaat's some weeks later when all German 
notices had to disappear. A few, who would 
not believe the order, held out obstinately, and 
the signs remained in German till they were 
either supplemented in 1916, on a very clear 
hint from Stamboul, by the obligatory Turkish 
language or later quite supplanted. It was 
not till some time after the German had dis- 
appeared — and this is worthy of note — that 
the Greek signs ceased to exist. Greek had 
been up to that time the most used tongue and 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 157 

was the commercial language of the Arme- 
nians. 

Then came the famous language regula- 
tions, which even went so far — with a year of 
grace granted owing to the extraordinary diffi- 
culties of the Turkish script — as to decree that 
in the offices of all trade undertakings of any 
public interest whatsoever, such as banks, 
newspapers, transport agencies, etc., the Turk- 
ish language should be used exclusively for 
book-keeping and any written communication 
with customers. One can imagine the "Os- 
manic Lloyd" and the ''German Bank" with 
Turkish book-keeping and Turkish letters 
written to an exclusively European clientele! 
Old and trusty employees suddenly found 
themselves faced with the choice of learning 
the difficult Turkish script or being turned out 
in a year's time. The possibility — indeed, the 
necessity — of employing Turkish hands in 
European businesses suddenly came within 
the range of practical politics — and that was 
exactly what the Turkish Government wanted. 

The arrangement had not yet come into 
operation when I left Constantinople, but it 
was hanging like the sword of Damocles over 



158 TWO WAR YEARS 

commercial undertakings that had hitherto 
been purely German. Optimists still hoped it 
never would come to this pass and would have 
welcomed any political-military blow that 
would put a damper on Turkey's arrogance. 
Others, believing firmly in a final Turkish 
victory, began to learn Turkish feverishly. 
Be that as it may, the new arrangements were 
hung up on the walls of all ofiices in the sum- 
mer of 1916 and created confusion enough. 

Many other measures for the systematic 
Turkification of commercial life and public 
intercourse followed hard on this first bold 
step, which I need scarcely mention here. And 
in spite of the ever-growing number of Ger- 
man officials in the diff*erent ministries, partly 
foisted on the Turkish Government by the 
German authorities, partly gladly accepted for 
the moment because the Turks had still much 
to learn from German organisation and could 
profit from employing Germans, in spite of the 
appointment of a number of German profes- 
sors to the Turkish University of Stamboul 
(who, however, as a matter of fact, like the 
German Government officials, had to wear the 
fez and learn Turkish within a year, and be- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 159 

sides roused most unfavourable and anti-Ger- 
man comment in the newspapers ) , it was soon 
perfectly evident to every unbiased witness 
that Germany would find no place in a victori- 
ous Turkey after the war if the "Committee 
for Union and Progress" did not need her. 
Some sort of light must surely have broken 
over the last blind optimism of the Germans in 
the course of the summer of 1916. 

Hand in hand with the nationalistic at- 
tempt to coerce European businesses into using 
the Turkish language there went more prac- 
tical attempts to turkify all the important 
branches of commerce by the founding of in- 
digenous organisations and the introduction 
of reforms of more material content than those 
language decrees. These efforts, in spite of 
the enormous absorption of all intellectual ca- 
pabilities and energies in war and the clash of 
arms, were expressed with a truly marvellous 
directness of aim, and, from the national 
standpoint, a truly commendable magnificence 
of conception. 

This latter has indeed never been lacking as 
a progressive ethnic factor in Turkish politics. 
The Turks have a wonderful understanding, 



160 TWO WAR YEARS 

too, of the importance of social problems, or 
at least, as a sovereign people, they feel in- 
stinctively what in a social connection will 
further their sovereignty. The war with its 
enormous intellectual activity has certainly 
brought all the political and economic re- 
sources of the Turks — including the Young 
Turkish Government — to the highest possible 
stage of development, and we ought not to be 
surprised if we often find that measures, 
whether of a beneficent or injurious character, 
are not lacking in modern exactness, clever 
technicality, and thoroughness of conception. 
Without anticipating, I should just like to note 
here how this change appears to affect the war. 
No one can doubt that it will enormously in- 
tensify zeal in the fight for the existence of the 
Turkey of the future, freed from its jingoistic 
outgrowths, once more come to its senses and 
confined to its own proper sphere of activity, 
Anatolia, the core of the Empire. But, on the 
other hand, iron might and determined war- 
fare against this misguided State are needed to 
root out false and harmful ideas. 

If, after this slight digression, we glance for 
a moment at the practical measures for a com- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 161 

plete Turkification of Turkey, the economic 
efforts at emancipation and the civic reforms 
carried through, we find first of all that the 
new Turkey, when she had thrown the Capit- 
ulations overboard, then proceeded to eman- 
cipate herself completely from European su- 
pervision in the realm of trade and commerce. 
A very considerable step in advance in the 
way of Turkish sovereignty and Turkish eco- 
nomic patriotism was the organisation and — 
since September 1916 — execution of the neo- 
Turkish autonomic customs tariff, which with 
one blow gives Turkish finances what the Gov- 
ernment formerly managed to extract pain- 
fully from the Great Powers bit by bit, by 
fair means or foul, at intervals of many years, 
and which with its hard-and-fast scale of 
taxes — which there appears to be no inclina- 
tion in political circles at the moment to modify 
by trade treaties ! — ^means an exceedingly ade- 
quate protection of Turkey's national produc- 
tions, without any reference whatever to the 
export interests of her allies, and is a very 
strong inducement to the renaissance of at any 
rate the most important national industries. 
The far-flung net of the "Djemiet" (whose 



162 TWO WAR YEARS 

acquaintance we have already made in another 
connection), that purely Turkish commercial 
undertaking with Talaat Bey at its head, regu- 
lating everything as it did, taking everything 
into its own hands, from the realising of the 
products of the Anatolian farmers (and inci- 
dentally bringing it about that their ally Ger- 
many had to pay heavily and always in cash, 
even although the Government itself owed mil- 
lions, to Germany and got everything on credit 
from flour out of Roumania to paper for their 
journals) to the most difficult rationing of 
towns, forms a foundation for the nationalis- 
ing of economic life of the very greatest im- 
portance. 

The establishment of purely Turkish trade 
and transport companies, often with pensioned 
Ministers as directors and principal sharehold- 
ers, and the new language regulations and 
other privileges will soon cut the ground away 
from under the feet of European concerns. 
Able assistance is given in this direction by the 
Tcmin and the Hilal (the "Crescent"), the 
newly founded "Committee" paper in the 
French language (when it is a question of the 
official influencing of public opinion in Euro- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 163 

pean and Levantine quarters, exceptions can 
be made even in language fanaticism!) in which 
a series of articles invariably appear at the 
founding of each new company praising the 
patriotic zeal of the founders. 

Then again there are the increasingly thinly 
veiled efforts to establish a purely Turkish na- 
tional banking system. Quite lately there has 
been a movement ini favour of founding a 
Turkish National Bank with the object of sup- 
planting the much-hated "Deutsche Bank" in 
spite of the credit it always gives, and that 
international and preponderatingly French in- 
stitution, the "Banque Imperiale Ottomane," 
which had already simply been sequestrated 
without more ado. 

The Turks have decided, too, that the mines 
are to be nationalised, and Turkish compa- 
nies have already been formed, without capital 
it is true, to work the mines after the war. The 
same applies to the railways — in spite of the 
fine German plans for the Baghdad Railway. 

All these wonderful efforts at emancipation 
are perfectly justified from the patriotic point 
of view, and are so many blows dealt at Ger- 
many, who, quite apart from Rohrbach's Welt- 



164 TWO WAR YEARS 

poUtikj had at least hoped to find a lucrative 
field of privileged commercial activity in the 
country of her close and devoted allies the 
Turks. It is of supreme significance that 
while the war is still at its height, while the 
Empire of the Sultan is defending its very ex- 
istence at the gates of the capital with German 
arms and German money, there is manifested 
with the most startling clearness the failure of 
German policy, the endangering of all these 
German "vital interests" in Turkey which ac- 
cording to Pan-German and Imperialistic 
views were one of the most important stakes 
to be won by wantonly letting loose this crimi- 
nal war on Europe. 

No doubt many a German was only too well 
aware of the fact that in this Turkey suddenly 
roused by the war all the ground had been lost 
that he had built on with such profit before, 
and many an anxious face did one see in Ger- 
man circles in Constantinople. I need not 
tarry here over the drastic comments I heard 
from so many German merchants on this sub- 
ject. They show a most curious state of mind 
on the part of those who had formerly, in their 
quest for gain and nothing but gain, profited in 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 165 

true parasitical fashion from the financial bene- 
fits of the Capitulations and had seen nothing 
but the money side of this arrangement which 
was, after all, entered into for other purposes. 
It was no rare thing and no paradox to find a 
German company director say, as I heard one 
say: "If things went against Turkey to-day, 
I would willingly shoulder my gun, old man 
as I am." 

No thinking man will expend too much grief 
over the ruthless abolition of the Capitulations, 
for they were unmoral and gave too much op- 
portunity to parasites and rogues, while they 
were quite inadequate to protect the interests 
of civilisation. They may have sufficed in the 
time of Abdul-Hamid, who was easily fright- 
ened off^ and was always sensible and polite in 
his dealings with Europe. For the Turkey of 
Enver and Talaat quite other measures are 
needed. One must, according to one's political 
standpoint, either recognise and accept their 
nationalistic programme of emancipation or 
combat it forcibly by introducing full Euro- 
pean control. And however willing one may 
be to let foreign nations develop in their own 
particular way and work out their own salva- 



166 TWO WAR YEARS 

lion, one's standpoint with regard to a State so 
behindhand, so fanatical, so misguided as 
Turkey can be but one: the introduction and 
continuation at all costs of whatever guaran- 
tees the best protection to European civilisa- 
tion in this land of such importance culturally 
and historically. 

Not only were Europeans, but the natives 
themselves, affected by the series of measures 
that one might class together under the head- 
ing of Turkish Internal Colonisation and the 
Nationalising of Anatolia. The programme of 
the Young Turks was not only a "Greater 
Turkey," but above all a purely Turkish 
Turkey; and if the former showed signs of 
failing because they had over-estimated their 
powers and their chances in the war or had em- 
ployed wrong methods, there was nothing at all 
to hinder a sovereign Government from striv- 
ing all the more ruthlessly to gain their second 
point. 

The way this Turkification of Anatolia was 
carried on was certainly not lacking in thor- 
oughness, like all their nationalistic eff*orts. 
The best means that lay to hand were the 
frightful Armenian persecutions which af- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 167 

fected a wonderful clearance among the popu- 
lation. "The properties of persons who have 
been dispatched elsewhere" within the meaning 
of the Provisory Bill were either distributed 
free or sold for a mere song to anyone who ap- 
plied to the Committee for them and proved 
themselves of the same political persuasion or 
of pure Turkish or preponderatingly Turkish 
nationality. The rent was often fixed as low 
as 30 piastres a month (about 5s, Sd,) for of- 
ficials and retired military men. In the case 
of the latter, Enver Pasha thought this an 
excellent opportunity for getting rid, through 
the medium of a kindly invitation to settle in 
the Interior, of those who worried him by their 
dissatisfaction with his system and who might 
have prepared difficulties for him. This "set- 
tling" was carried out with the greatest zeal 
in the exceptionally flourishing and fruitful 
districts of Brussa, Smyrna- Aidin, Eskishehir, 
Adabazar, Angora, and Adana, where Arme- 
nians and Greeks had played such a great, and, 
to the Turks, unpopular part as pioneers of 
civilisation. 

The semi-official articles in the Tanin were 
perfectly right in praising the local authorities 



168 TWO WAR YEARS 

who in contrast with their former indifference 
and ignorance "had now fully recognised the 
great national importance of internal colonisa- 
tion and the settling of Mohadjirs (emigrants 
from the lost Turkish territory in Bosnia, Mac- 
edonia, Thrace, etc.) in the country." There 
is nothing to be said in favour of the stupid, 
unprogressive character of the Anatolian as 
contrasted with the strength, physical endur- 
ance, intelligence, and mobility of these emi- 
grants. The latter had also, generally speak- 
ing, lived in more highly developed districts. 
The great drawback of the Mohadjirs, how- 
ever, is their instability, their idleness and love 
of wandering, their frivolity, and their extra- 
ordinary fanaticism. As faithful Mohamme- 
dans following the standard of their Padishah 
and leaving the parts of the country that had 
fallen under Christian rule, they seemed to 
think they were justified in behaving like spoilt 
children towards the native population. They 
treated them with ruthless disregard, they were 
bumptious, and, if their new neighbours were 
Greek or Armenian, they inclined to use force, 
a proceeding which was always possible be- 
cause the Government did not take away their 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 169 

firearms and were even known to have doled 
them out to stir up unrest. It has occurred 
more than once that Mohadjirs have crossed 
swords even with Turkish Anatolians living 
peacefully in their own villages. One can 
then easily imagine how much more the her- 
etic giaurs ("Christian dogs," "unclean men") 
had to suffer at their hands. 

I should like to say a word here about these 
Greek persecutions in Thrace and Western 
Anatolia that have become notorious through- 
out the whole of Europe. They took place 
just before the outbreak of war, and cost thou- 
sands of peaceful Greeks — ^men, women, and 
children — ^their lives, and reduced to ashes doz- 
ens of flourishing villages and towns. At the 
time of the murder of Sarajevo, I happened 
to be staying in the vilajet of Aidin, in Smyr- 
na and the Hinterland, and saw with my own 
eyes such shameful deeds as must infuriate 
anyone against the Turkish Government that 
aids and abets such barbarity — from old wo- 
men being driven along by a dozen Mohadjirs 
and dissipated soldiers to the smoking ruins 
of Phocaea. 

Everyone at that time, at any rate in Smyr- 



170 TWO WAR YEARS 

na, expected the immediate outbreak of a new 
Grseco-Turkish war, and perhaps the only 
thing that prevented it was the method of pro- 
crastination adopted by both sides, for both 
were waiting for the Dreadnoughts they had 
ordered, until finally these smaller clouds were 
swallowed up in the mighty thunder-cloud 
gathering on the European horizon. Only the 
extreme speed with which one dramatic event 
followed another, and my own mobilisation 
which precluded my writing anything of a po- 
litical nature, prevented me on that occasion 
from giving my sinister impressions of Young 
Turkish jingoism and Mohadjir brutality. 
Even if I had been able to write what I 
thought it is extremely doubtful if it would 
ever have seen the light of day, for the Ger- 
man papers were but little inclined, as I had 
opportunity of discovering personally, to say 
anything unpleasant about the Young Turkish 
Government, whose help they were already 
reckoning on, and preferred rather to behave 
in a most un-neutral manner and keep abso- 
lutely silent about all the ill-treatment and 
abuse that had been meted out to Greece. But 
I remembered these scenes most opportunely 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 171 

later, and that visit of mine to Western Ana- 
tolia was certainly most useful in increasing 
my knowledge of Young Turkish methods of 
"internal colonisation." 

But all the methods used are by no means 
forcible. Attempts are now being made — and 
this again is most significant for the spirit of 
the newest Young Turkish era — ^to gain a foot- 
ing in the world of science as opposed to force, 
and so to be able to carry out their measures 
more systematically and give them the appear- 
ance of beneficent modern social reforms. So 
it comes about that the Turkish idea of pene- 
trating and "cleaning-up" Anatolia finds prac- 
tical expression on the one hand in exterminat- 
ing and robbing the Christian population, 
while on the other it inclines to efforts which 
in time may work out to be a real blessing. 
The common principle underlying both is 
Nationalism. 

Anatolia was suddenly "discovered." At 
long length the Young Turkish Government, 
roused intellectually and patriotically by the 
war and brought to their senses by the terrible 
loss of human life entailed, suddenly reahsed 
the enormous national importance of Anatolia, 



172 TWO WAR YEARS 

that hitherto much-neglected nucleus of the 
Ottoman Empire. Under the spiritual inspi- 
ration of Mehmed Emin, the national poet of 
Anatolian birth whose poems with their sym- 
pathy of outlook and noble simplicity of form 
make such a warm-hearted and successful ap- 
peal to the best kind of patriotism, men have 
begun since 1916, even in the circles of the ar- 
rogant "Stambul Effendi," to take an interest 
in the kaha tilrk (uncouth Turk), the Anato- 
lian peasant, his needs and his standard of civ- 
ilisation. The real, needy, primitive Turk of 
the Interior has suddenly become the general 
favourite. 

A whole series of most remarkable lectures 
was delivered publicly in the Tilrk Odjaghi, 
under the auspices of the Committee, by doc- 
tors, social politicians, and political econo- 
mists, and these were reported and discussed at 
great length in all the Turkish newspapers. 
Their subject was the incredible destitution in 
Anatolia, the devastation wrought by syphilis, 
malaria, and other terrible dirt diseases, abor- 
tions as a result of hopeless poverty, the lack 
of men as a result of constant military service 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 173 

in many wars, and they called for immediate 
and drastic reforms. 

It is with the greatest pleasure that I ac- 
knowledge that this first late step on the way 
of improvement, this self-knowledge, which 
appeals to me more thoroughly than anything 
else I saw in Turkey, is probably really the 
beginning of a happier era for that beautiful 
land of Anatolia, so capable of development 
but so cruelly neglected. For one can no 
longer doubt that the Government has the 
real intention of carrying out actual reforms, 
for they must be only too well aware that the 
strengthening and healing of Anatolia, the nu- 
cleus of the Turkish race, is absolutely essential 
for any Turkish mastery, and is the very first 
necessity for the successful carrying out of 
more far-reaching national exertions. With 
truly modern realisation of the needs of the 
case, directly after Dr. Behaeddin Shakir 
Bey's first compelling lecture, difiPerent local 
government officials, especially the Vali of the 
Vilajet of Kastamuni, which was notorious for 
its syphilis epidemics, made unprecedented ef- 
forts to improve the terrible hygienic condi- 
tions then reigning. Let us hope that such ef- 



174 TWO WAR YEARS 

forts will bear fruit. But this will probably 
only be the case to any measurable extent later, 
after the war, when Turkey will find herself 
really confined to Anatolia, and will have time 
and strength for positive social work. 

In the meantime I cannot get rid of the un- 
easy impression that this "discovery" of Ana- 
tolia and zealous Turkish social politics are no 
more than a cleverly worked excuse on the 
part of the Government for further measures 
of Turkification, and the cloven hoof is un- 
fortunately only too apparent in all this seem- 
ingly noble effort on the part of the Conmiit- 
tee. One hears and sees daily the methods that 
go hand in hand with this official pushing into 
the foreground of the great importance of the 
purely Turkish elements in Anatolia — Arme- 
nian persecutions, trickery, expropriations car- 
ried out against Greeks, the yielding up of 
flourishing districts to quarrelsome Mohadjirs. 
So long as the Turkish Government fancy 
themselves conquerors in the great war, so long 
as they pursue the shadow of a "Greater Tur- 
key," so long as Turkey continues to dissipate 
her forces she will not accomplish much for 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 175 

Anatolia, in spite of her awakening and her 
real desire for reform. 

Finally, in this discovery of Anatolia, in this 
desire to put an end to traditional destitution, 
this recognition of the real import of even the 
poorest, most primitive, dullest peasant peoples 
in the undeveloped Interior, so long as they 
are of Turkish race, in this sudden flood of 
learned eloquence over the needs and the true 
inner worth of these miserable neglected 
Turkish peasants, in this pressing demand for 
thorough reforms for the economic and social 
strengthening of this element — ^measures which 
with the present ruling spirit of jingoism in 
the Government threaten to be carried through 
only at the expense of the non-Turkish popu-- 
lation of Anatolia — ^we see very clear proof 
that the neo-Turkish movement is a pure race 
movement, is nothing but Pan-Turkism both 
outwardly and inwardly, and has very little 
indeed to do with religious questions or with 
Islam. The idea of Islam, or rather Pan-Is- 
lamism, is a complete failure. This we shall 
try to show in the following chapter. 



176 TWO WAR YEARS 



CHAPTER VIII 

Religion and race — The Islam policy of Abdul-Hamid 
and of the Young Turks — Turanism and Pan-Is- 
lamism as political principles — Turanism and the 
Quadruple Alliance — Greed and race-fanaticism — 
Religious traditions and modern reforms — Reform 
in the law — A modern Sheikh-ul-Islam — Reform 
and nationalisation — The Armenian and Greek Pa- 
triarchates — The failure of Pan-Islamism — The al- 
ienation of the Arabs — Djemal Pasha's "hangman's 
policy" in Syria — ^Djemal as a "Pro-French" — 
Djemal and Enver — Djemal and Germany — His 
true character — The attempt against the Suez Ca- 
nal — Djemal's murderous work nears completion — 
The great Arabian and Syrian Separatist movement 
— The defection of the Emir of Mecca and the 
great Arabian catastrophe. 

In little-informed circles in Europe people are 
still under the false impression that the Young 
Turks of to-day, the intellectual and political 
leaders of Turkey in this war, are authentic, 
zealous, and even fanatical Mohammedans, 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 177 

and superficial observers explain all unpleasant 
occurrences and outbreaks of Young Turkish 
jingoism on Pan-Islamic grounds, especially 
as Turkey has not been slow in proclaiming 
her "Holy War." But this conception is en- 
tirely wrong. The artificial character of the 
"Djihad," which was only set in motion against 
a portion of the "unbelievers," while the others 
became more and more the ruling body in 
Turkey, is the best proof of the untenability 
of this theory. The truth is that the present 
political regime is the complete denial of the 
Pan-Islamic idea and the substitution of the 
Pan-Turkish idea of race. 

Abdul-Hamid, that much-maligned and de- 
throned Sultan, who, however, towers head 
and shoulders above all the Young Turks put 
together in practical intelligence and states- 
manly skill, and would never have committed 
the unpardonable error of throwing in his lot 
with Germany in the war and so bringing 
about the certain downfall of Turkey, was the 
last ruler of Turkey that knew how to make 
use of Pan-Islamism as a successful instrument 
of authority. 

Enver and Talaat and all that breed of 



178 TWO WAR YEARS 

jingoists on the Ittahad (Committee for Union 
and Progress) were upstarts without any 
schooling in political history, and so all the 
more inclined to the doctrinal revolutionism 
and short-sighted fanaticism of the successful 
adventurer, and were much too limited to rec- 
ognise the tremendous political import of Pan- 
Islamism. Naturally once they had conceived 
the idea of the ''Djihad," they tried to make 
theoretical use of Pan-Islamism ; but practi- 
cally, far from extending Turkey's influence 
to distant Arabian lands, to the Soudan and 
India, they simply let Turkey go to ruin 
through their Pan-Turkish illusions and their 
race-fanaticism. 

Abdul-Hamid with his clever diplomacy 
managed to maintain, if not the real sympa- 
thies, at any rate the formal loyalty of the 
Arabs and their solidarity with the rest of the 
Ottoman Empire. It was he who conceived 
the idea of that undertaking of eminent polit- 
ical importance, the Hedjaz Railway, which 
facilitates pilgrimages to the holy cities of 
Mecca and Medina and links up the Arabian 
territory with the Turkish, and he was always 
able to quell any disturbances in these outly- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 179 

ing parts of the Empire with very few troops 
indeed. Nowadays the Young Turkish Gov- 
ernment, even if they had the troops to spare, 
might send a whole army to the Hedjaz and 
they would be like an island of sand in the 
midst of that stormy Arab sea. The Arabs, 
intellectually far superior to the Turks, have 
at last made up their minds to defy their op- 
pressors, and all the Arabic-speaking parts of 
the Ottoman Empire may be taken as already 
lost, no matter what the final result of the 
great war may be. 

The Young Turks had scarcely come into 
power when they began with incredible lack 
of tact to treat the Arabs in a most supercilious 
manner, although as a matter of fact the Arabs 
far surpassed them in intellect and culture. 
They inaugurated a most un-modern campaign 
of shameless blood-sucking, cheated them of 
their rights, treated them in a bureaucratic 
manner, and generally acted in such an un- 
skilful way that they finally alienated for ever 
the Arab element as they had already done in 
the case of the Armenians, the Greeks, and 
the Albanians. 

The ever-recurring disturbances in Yemen, 



180 TWO WAR YEARS 

finally somewhat inadequately quelled by Izzet 
Pasha, are still in the memory of all. And 
later, directly after the reconquering of Ad- 
rianople during the Second Balkan war, there 
was another moment of real national rebirth 
when a reconciliation might have been effected. 
The visit of a great Syrian and Arabian depu- 
tation to the Sultan to congratulate him over 
this auspicious event should have provided an 
excellent opportunity. I was staying some 
months then in Constantinople on my way back 
from Africa, and I certainly thought that the 
half -broken threads might have been knotted 
together again then if the Young Turks had 
only approached the Arabs in the right way. 
Even the great Franco-British attack on 
Stamboul might have been calculated to rouse 
a feeling of solidarity among the Mohamme- 
dans living under the Ottoman flag, and in the 
autumn and winter of 1915-1916 Arab troops 
actually did defend the entrance to the Dar- 
danelles with great courage and skill. But 
Arab loyalty could not withstand for ever the 
mighty flood of race-selfishness that possessed 
the Young Turks right from the moment of 
their entry into the war. The enthusiasm of 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 181 

the Arabs soon disappeared when Pan-Turkish 
ideas were proclaimed all too clearly even to 
the inhabitants of their own land, when an 
era of systematic enmity towards the non- 
Turkish parts of the population was intro- 
duced and the heavy fist of the Central Com- 
mittee was laid on the southern parts of the 
Empire as well. 

An attempt was made to bring the ethnic 
principle of "Turanism" within the region of 
practical politics, but it simply degenerated 
into complete race-partiality and was not cal- 
culated to further the ideas of Pan-Islamism 
and the Turko- Arabian alliance which were 
both of such importance in the present war. 
It is this idea of Turanism that lies at the back 
of the efforts being made towards a purely 
Turkish Turkey, and that of course makes it 
clear at once that it must to a very large extent 
oppose the idea of Pan-Islamism. It is true 
that both principles may be made use of side by 
side as sources of propaganda for the idea of 
expansion and the policy of a "Greater Tur- 
key." Turanists peep over the crest of the 
Caucasus down into the Steppes of the Volga, 
where the Russian Tartars live, and to the 



182 TWO WAR YEARS 

borders of Western Siberia and Inner China 
where in Russian Turkestan a race of people 
of very close kinship live and where very prob- 
ably the Ottoman people had their cradle. The 
Pan-Islamists want the alliance of these Rus- 
sian parts as well, but from another point of 
view, and, above all, they aim at the expansion 
of Ottoman rule to the farthest corners of Af- 
rica and South- West Asia, to the borders of 
negro territory, and through Persia, Afghanis- 
tan, and Baluchistan to the foot of the Hima- 
layas, while on grounds of practical politics 
they strive to abolish the old, seemingly insur- 
mountable antithesis between Sonnites and 
Shiites within the sanctuary of Islam. 

The programme of the so-called "D jihad" 
works on this principle, but goes much farther. 
As well as stirring up against their present rul- 
ers those parts of Egypt and Tripoli which 
once owned allegiance to the Sultan and the 
Atlas lands, which are at any rate spiritually 
dependent on the Caliph in Stamboul, the 
*'D jihad" aims at introducing the spirit of in- 
dependence into all English, French, Italian, 
and Russian Colonial territory by rousing the 
Mohammedans and so doing infinite harm to 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 183 

the enemies of Turkey. It is most important, 
therefore, always to differentiate between this 
"Holy War" "stirring-up" propaganda from 
Senegal to Turkestan and British India, and 
the more territorial Pan-Islamism of the pres- 
ent war, which goes hand in hand with the ef- 
forts being made towards a "Greater Turkey." 

Instead of uniting all these principles skil- 
fully for the realisation of a great end, mak- 
ing siu^e of the Arab element by wisely re- 
straining their selfish and exaggeratedly pro- 
Turkish instincts and their despotic lust for 
power, and so giving their programme of ex- 
pansion southwards some prospect of succeed- 
ing, the Turks gave way right from the begin- 
ning of the war to such a flood of brutal, nar- 
row-minded race-fanaticism and desire to en- 
rich the Turkish element at the cost of the 
other inhabitants of the country, that no one 
can really be surprised at the pitiable result 
of the efforts to secure a Greater Turkey. 

I should just like to give one small example 
of the fanatical hatred that exists even in high 
official circles against the non- Turkish element 
in this country of mixed race. The following 
anecdote will give a clear enough idea of the 



184 TWO WAR YEARS 

ruling spirit of fanaticism and greed. I was 
house-hunting in Pera once and could not find 
anything suitable. I approached a member 
of the Committee and he said in solemn earn- 
est: "Oh, just wait a few weeks. We are all 
hoping that Greece will declare war on us be- 
fore long, and then all the Greeks will be 
treated as the Armenians have been. I can 
let you have the nicest villa on the Bosporus. 
But then," he added with gleaming eyes, "we 
won't be so stupid as merely to turn them out. 
These Greek dogs {kopek rum) will have the 
pleasure of seeing us take everything away 
from them — everything — and compelling them 
to give up their own property by formal con- 
tract." 

I can guarantee that this is practically a 
word-for-word rendering of this extraordinary 
outburst of fanaticism and greed on the part 
of an otherwise harmless and decent man. I 
could not help shuddering at such opinions. 
Apparently it was not enough that Turkey 
was already at war with three Great Powers ; 
she must needs seek armed conflict with 
Greece, so that, as was the outspoken, the open, 
and freely-admitted intention of official per- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 185 

sons, she might then deal with four and a half 
milHons of Ottoman Greeks, practically her 
own countrymen, as she had done with the un- 
fortunate Armenians. In face of such opin- 
ions one cannot but reahse how unsure the ex- 
istence of the Young Turkish State has be- 
come by its entry into the war, and cannot but 
foresee that this race-fanaticism will lead the 
nation to political and social suicide. Can one 
imagine a purely Turkish Turkey, when even 
the notion of a Greater Turkey failed? 

Pessimists have often said of the Turkish 
question that the Turks' principal aim in de- 
termining on a complete Turkification of Ana- 
tolia by any, even the most brutal, means, is 
that at the conclusion of war they can at least 
say with justification: "Anatolia is a purely 
Turkish country and must therefore be left 
to us." What they propose to bequeath to the 
victorious Russians is an Armenia without 
Armenians ! 

The idea of "Turanism" is a most interesting 
one, and as a widespread nationalistic princi- 
ple has given much food for thought to Tur- 
key's ally, Germany. Turanism is the realisa- 
tion, reawakened by neo-Turkish efforts at 



186 TWO WAR YEARS 

political and territorial expansion, of the origi- 
nal race-kinship existing between the Turks 
and the many peoples inhabiting the regions 
north of the Caucasus, between the Volga and 
the borders of Inner China, and particularly 
in Russian Central Asia. Ethnographically 
this idea was perfectly justified, but politically 
it entails a tremendous dissipation of strength 
which must in the end lead to grave disappoint- 
ment and failure. All the Turkish attempts 
to rouse up the population of the Caucasus 
either fell on unfruitful ground or went to 
pieces against the strong Russian power reign- 
ing there. Enver's marvellous conception of 
an offensive against Russian Transcaucasia led 
right at the beginning of the war to terrible 
bloodshed and defeat. 

People in neutral countries have had plenty 
of opportunity of judging of the value of those 
arguments advanced by Tatar professors and 
journalists of Russian citizenship for the 
''Greater-Turkish" solution of the race ques- 
tions of the Russian Tatars and Turkestan, 
for these refugees from Baku and the Cauca- 
sus, paid by the Stamboul Committee, jour- 
neyed half over Europe on their propaganda 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 187 

tour. The idea of Turanism has been taken 
up with such enthusiasm by the men of the 
Young Turkish Committee, and utilised with 
such effect for purposes of propaganda and tr 
form a scientific basis for their neo-Turkish 
aims and aspirations, that a stream of feeling 
in favour of the Magyars has set in in Turkey, 
which has not failed to demolish to a still 
greater extent their already weakened enthu- 
siasm for their German allies. And it is not 
confined to purely intellectual and cultural 
spheres, but takes practical form by the Turks 
declaring, as they have so often done in their 
papers in almost anti-German articles about 
Turanism, that what they really require in 
the way of European technique or European 
help they much prefer to accept from their 
kinsmen the Hungarians rather than from the 
Germans. 

To the great annoyance of Germany, who 
would like to keep her heavy hand laid on the 
ally whom she has so far guided and for whom 
she pays, the practical results of the idea of 
Turanism are already noticeable in many 
branches of economic and commercial life. The 
Hungarians are closely allied to the Turks not 



188 TWO WAR YEARS 

only by blood but in general outlook, and form 
a marked contrast to Germany's cold and 
methodical calculation in worming her way into 
Turkish commercial life. After the war when 
Turkey is seeking for stimulation, it will be 
easy enough to make use of Hungarian influ- 
ence to the detriment of Germany. Turanis- 
tic ideas have even been brought into play to 
establish still more firmly the union between 
Turkey and her former enemy Bulgaria, and 
the people of Turkey are reminded that the 
Bulgars are not really Slavs but Slavic Fino- 
Tartars. 

In proportion as the Young Turks have 
brought racial politics to a fine art, so they 
have neglected the other, the religious side. 
More and more, Islam, the rock of Empire, has 
been sacrificed to the needs of race-politics. 
Those who look upon Enver and Talaat and 
their consorts to-day as a freemasonry of time- 
serving opportunists rather than as good Mo- 
hammedans come far nearer the truth than 
those who believe the idea spread by ignorant 
globe-trotters that every Turk is a zealous fol- 
lower of Islam. It was not for nothing that 
Enver Pasha, the adventurer and revolution- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 189 

ary, went so far even in externals as to arouse 
the stern disapproval of a wide circle of his 
people. With true time-serving adaptability 
to all modern progress — and who will blame 
him? — ^he even finally sacrificed the Turkish 
soldier's hallowed traditional headgear, the fez. 
While the halpak, even in its laced variety, 
could still be called a kind of field-grey or vari- 
egated or fur edition of the fez, the ragged- 
looking kahalak, called the "Enveriak" to dis- 
tinguish it from other varieties, is certainly on 
the way towards being a real sun helmet. Still 
more recently (summer 1916) a black-and- 
white cap that looks absolutely European was 
introduced into the Ottoman Navy. The 
simple, devout Mohanmiedan folk were most 
unwilling to accept these changes which flew 
direct in the face of all tradition. They may 
be externals of but little importance, but in 
spite of their insignificance they show clearly 
the ruling spirit in official Young Turkish 
spheres. 

This is in the harmless realm of fashion, or 
at any rate military fashion, exactly the same 
spirit as has caused the Turkish Government 
to undertake since 1916 radical changes in the 



190 TWO WAR YEARS 

very much more important field of private and 
public law. Special commissions consisting of 
eminent Turkish lawyers have been formed to 
carry through this reform of law and justice, 
and they have been hard at work ever since 
their formation. What is characteristic and 
modern about the reform is that the prepond- 
erating role hitherto played by the Sheriat 
Law, founded on the Koran and at any rate 
semi-religious, is to be drastically curtailed in 
favour of a system of purely Civil law, which 
has been strung together from the most varied 
sources, even European law being brought un- 
der contribution, and the "Code Napoleon," 
which has hitherto only been used in Commer- 
cial law. This of course leads to a great cur- 
tailment of the activity and influence of the 
kadis and muftis, the semi-religious judges, 
who have now to yield place to a more mun- 
dane system. The first inexorable consequence 
of the reform was that the Sheikh-ul-Islam, 
the highest authority of Islam in the whole Ot- 
toman Empire, had to give up a large part of 
his powers, and incidentally of his income. 

The changes made were so far-reaching, and 
the spirit of the reform so modern, that, in spite 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE I 191 

of the unshakable power of Talaat's truly dic- 
tatorial Cabinet which got it passed, a con- 
cession had to be made to the public opinion 
roused against the measure. The form was 
kept as it was, but the Sheikh-ul-Islam, Hairi 
Effendi, refused ostensibly to sign the decree 
and gave in his resignation. Not only, how- 
ever, was an immediate successor found for 
him (Mussa Kiazim Effendi), who gave his 
signature and even began to work hard for 
the reform, but — and this is most significant 
for the relationship of the Young Turks 
towards Islam — Hairi Effendi, the same ex- 
Sheikh-ul-Islam who had proclaimed the 
Fetwa for the "Holy War," gave up his post 
without a murmur, and in the most peaceable 
way, and remained one of the principal pillars 
of the * 'Committee for Union and Progress." 
His resignation was nothing but a farce to 
throw dust in the eyes of the all-too-trusting 
lower classes. After he had succeeded by this 
manoeuvre in getting the reform of the law 
(which as a measure of Turkification was of 
more consequence to him now than his own 
sadly curtailed juristic fimctions) accepted at 
a pinch by the conservative population who 



192 TWO WAR YEARS 

still clung firmly to Islam, he went on to play 
his great role in the programme of jingoism. 
A "measure of Turkification" we called it, for 
that is what it amounts to practically, like 
everything else the men of the "Ittihad" take 
in hand. 

I tried to give some hint of this within the 
limits of the censorship as long ago as the sum- 
mer of 1916 in a series of articles I wrote for 
the Kolnische Zeitung, Here I should like just 
to confine myself to one point. Naturally the 
reform of the law aimed principally at substi- 
tuting these newly formed pure Turkish con- 
ceptions for the Arabian legal ideas that had 
been the only thing available hitherto. 
(Everything that this victorious Turkey had 
absorbed and worked up in the way of civilised 
notions was either Arabian or Persian or of 
European origin.) It set to work now in the 
sphere of family law, which hitherto had been 
specially sacrosanct and only subordinate to 
the religious Sheria, and where tradition was 
strongest — not like commercial and maritime 
law which had been quite modern for a long 
time. 

The reform went so far that it even tried 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 193 

to introduce a kind of civil marriage, whereas 
up till now all marriages, divorces, and every- 
thing to do with inheritance had taken place 
exclusively before religious officials. I may 
just add that these newest reforms give women 
no wider rights than they had before. Perhaps 
this may be taken as an indication that they 
have been conceived far less from a social than 
from a political point of view. What induced 
the Turkish Government to introduce anything 
so entirely modern as civil marriage in defiance 
of age-old custom was more than likely the de- 
sire to put an end to non-Turkish Ottomans 
contracting marriages and making arrange- 
ments about inheritance, etc., before their own 
privileged, ethnically independent organisa- 
tions, and so to deal the final death-blow to 
the Armenian and Greek Patriarchates. If 
Family Law was modernised in this way, there 
would not be the faintest shadow of excuse left 
for the existence of these institutions which 
enjoyed a far-reaching and influential auton- 
omy. 

The Armenian Patriarchate got short shrift 
indeed. By dissolving the Patriarchate in the 
Capital, breaking off all relations with the Ar- 



194 TWO WAR YEARS 

menian headquarters in Etzmiadjin and al- 
lowing only a very small remainder of Patri- 
archate to be sent up in Jersusalem under 
special State supervision, the Turks, as a logi- 
cal sequence to the Armenian atrocities, simply 
dealt the death-blow in the summer of 1916 
to this important social institution. 

The Greek organisation, however, conducted 
by a more numerous and, outwardly at any 
rate, better protected people, offered far more 
resistance, and could not be simply wiped out 
with a stroke of the pen. A direct attempt to 
suppress it was made as early as 1910, but 
broke down entirely in face of the firm attitude 
of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople. 
Now the Young Turks seem to have come to 
the conclusion that less drastic methods, begin- 
ning on a juristic basis, may have a better ef- 
fect. 

We have taken this one example in order to 
get at the whole neo-Turkish method of pro- 
cedure. It consists in pushing forward, if need 
be with greater delicacy than before and on 
the round-about road of real modern reforms, 
towards the one immovable goal: the complete 
Turkification of Turkey. The reform of the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 195 

law, which we have treated more exhaustively 
as an example of the first rank, is typical of 
the Young Turkish national tendency. Nat- 
urally it has its use, too, as a means of further 
throwing off the foreign political yoke. 
Through the modernising of the whole Turk- 
ish legal system, Europe is to be shown that 
the Capitulations can be dispensed with. 

The reform throws a vivid light, too, on the 
inner relationship of the jingoistic, pure Pan- 
Turkish leaders of present-day Turkey 
towards religion. And it is perhaps not gen- 
erally known that at all the deliberations of 
the "Committee" where the will of Talaat, the 
uncrowned king of Turkey, is alone decisive, 
the opinion of the Grand Master of the Tur- 
kish Freemasons is always listened to, and 
that he is one of the most willing tools of the 
"Ittihad." 

No, the members of the "Committee for 
Union and Progress" have for a very long time 
simply snapped their fingers at Islam if it 
hindered them making use of and profiting 
from their own subjects. They know very 
well how to retain at least the outward sem- 
blance of friendliness so long as Islam does not 



196 TWO WAR YEARS 

directly cross the path of Pan-Turkism. But 
the Armenian atrocities, instigated by Talaat, 
have as little to do with religion, they are as 
exclusively the result of pure race-fanaticism, 
professional jealousy, and greed, as the hostile, 
devil-may-care attitude towards Greece, and 
the millions of well-to-do Ottoman Greeks who 
are the next troublesome competitors and suit- 
able victims of aggrandisement to be disposed 
of after the Armenians, or as the terrible per- 
secutions against the highest class of Syrians 
and Arabs pictured in Djemal Pasha's famous 
paper. They are Turks, pure Turks with the 
most narrow-minded jingoistic point of view, 
and not broad-minded Mohammedans, that sit 
on the Committee in "Nur-el-Osmanieh" in 
Stamboul and make all these wonderful polit- 
ical plans, from internal reforms and measures 
of government which attempt to adapt them- 
selves to European technique by sacrificing an- 
cient traditions, to the hangman's tactics em- 
ployed against their own subjects. 

Take the case of the Syrians and the Arabs. 
The "Ittihad" clique, weltering in a fog of 
Pan-Turkish illusion, were yet not without 
anxiety with regard to the intellectual and so- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 197 

cial superiority, to say nothing of the political 
sharpness, of these peoples compared with the 
Turks. They had yielded entirely to their 
brutal instincts of extermination and suppres- 
sion towards foreign races, and the Germans 
had made no attempt to curb them. They were 
political parvenus suddenly freed from the 
control of the civihsed Great Powers, and they 
did not know how to make use of that freedom. 
Perhaps they felt themselves already on the 
edge of an abyss and were constrained to 
snatch what they could while there was yet 
time. 

Is it any wonder, then, that the Turks should 
throw over all trace of decency towards the 
Syrians and the Arabs once they were sure 
that these peoples, who regarded their oppres- 
sors with most justifiable hatred, would refuse 
to have anything to do with the "Holy War" 
of the Turanian Pseudo-Caliph? 

The last remnants of the traditional Pan- 
Islamic esteem of their Arab neighbours, al- 
ready sadly shattered by the Young Turks' 
ruthless policy towards them since 1909, were 
flung light-heartedly overboard by a Govern- 
ment that knew they were to blame for the 



198 



TWO WAR YEARS 



Arab defection but thought they had found a 
substitute that appealed more to their true 
Asiatic character in these Turanistic dreams 
of expansion and measures of Turkification. 
And while fanatical adventurers and money- 
grubbing deputies paid by the easily duped 
German Embassy were preaching a perfectly 
useless "Holy War" on the confines of the 
Arabian territory of the Turkish Empire, 
towards the part occupied by the English, 
while Enver Pasha continued to visit the holy 
places of Islam, where he got a frosty enough 
reception, although the wonderfully worded 
communiques on the subject succeeded in 
blinding the population to the true state of af- 
fairs, "the hangman's policy" of Djemal 
Pasha, the Commander of the Fourth Os- 
manic Army, and Naval Minister, had been 
for a long time in full swing in the old civilised 
land of Syria against the best families among 
the Mohammedan as well as the Christian 
population. The whole civilised world is lay- 
ing up a store of accusations of this kind 
against the Turks, and it is to be hoped that a 
public sentence will be passed on these gentle- 
men of the "Ittihad" on the conclusion of 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 199 

peace by a combined court of Europeans and 
Americans. 

Here again the Young Turkish Government 
assumed the existence of a widespread con- 
spiracy and a Syrian and Arabian Separatist 
movement towards autonomy, which was to 
free these lands from Turkish rule and to be 
established under Anglo-French protection. 
At the time of the Armenian persecutions the 
Committee had managed most cunningly to 
turn the whole Armenian question to their own 
account by publishing false official reports by 
the thousand, accompanied by any number of 
photographs of "bands of conspirators," the 
authenticity of which never has been proved 
and never will be ; indeed one can only wonder 
where the Turkish Government got them from. 

In this case again there was no lack of of- 
ficial printed commentaries on Djemal Pasha's 
"hanging list," and any reader of the Journal 
de Beyrouth in war-time would have had no 
difficulty in compiling it. It is certainly not 
my intention to question the existence of a 
Separatist movement towards autonomy in 
Syria, but it was a sporadic tendency only, and 
ought never to have been made the excuse for 



200 TWO WAR YEAKS 

the wholesale execution of highly respected and 
well-born citizens who had nothing whatever 
to do with the matter. 

In the Young Turkish memorandum on this 
act of spying and bloodshed, the passages most 
underlined and printed in the boldest charac- 
ters, the passages which, according to official 
intention, were to justify these frightful re- 
prisals, form the most terrible indictment ever 
brought against Turkish despotism, and pro- 
vide the most complete proof of the truth of 
all the accusations made against the Turkish 
Government by the ill-treated and oppressed 
Syrians and Arabians. On anyone who does 
not read with Young Turkish eyes the memor- 
andum makes directly the opposite impression 
to what was intended. And even if the Sep- 
aratist movement had existed in any greater 
extent — ^which was quite out of the question 
owing to lack of weapons, conflicting interests, 
the contrasts in the people themselves, some 
of them Mohammedan, some Christian, some 
sectarian, and the impossibility of any kind of 
organisation under the stern discipline of Tur- 
kish rule — the Turks would have most richly 
deserved it and it would have been justified by 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 201 

the thousands of brutalities inflicted by the 
Old and Young Turkish regimes on the highly 
civilised Arabian people and their industrious 
and commercial neighbours the Syrians, who 
had always been much influenced by European 
culture. Anyone who has once watched how 
the Committee in Stamboul made a pretext of 
events on the borders of Caucasia to extermi- 
nate a whole people, including women and 
children, even in Western and Central Anato- 
lia and the Capital, can no longer be in the 
least doubt as to the methods employed by 
Djemal Pasha, the "hangman" of Syrians and 
Arabs, how grossly he must have exaggerated 
and misstated the facts to find enough victims 
so that he could look on for a year and a half 
with a cigar in his mouth — as he himself 
boasted — while the flower of Syrian and Ara- 
bian youth, the elite of society, and the aged 
heads of the best families in the land were 
either hanged or shot. 

I should like to take the opportunity here of 
giving a short description of Djemal Pasha, 
this man who, according to Turkish ideas, is 
destined still to play a great part in Turkish 
politics. I should also like to clear up a mis- 



202 TWO WAR YEARS 

understanding that seems to exist in civilised 
Europe with regard to him. There is still an 
idea abroad that Djemal Pasha is pro-French, 
this man who set out on his adventure against 
the Suez Canal as "Vice-king of Egypt," and, 
after he had been beaten there, settled in Syria 
as dictator with unlimited power — even openly 
defying the Central Government in Constanti- 
nople when he felt piqued — so that as com- 
mander of the Fourth Army he could support 
the attempt against Egypt, but principally to 
satisfy his murderous instincts. Anyone who 
has seen this man close at hand (whom a Ger- 
man journalist belonging to the Berliner Tage- 
blatt with the most fulsome flattery once 
called one of the handsomest men in Turkey) 
knows enough. Small, thickset, a beard and 
a pair of cunning cruel eyes are the most prom- 
inent features of this face from which every- 
one must turn in disgust who remembers the 
"hangman's" part played by the man. 

It is extraordinary that he should still pass 
as Pro-French in many quarters, and perhaps 
it is part of his slyness to preserve this role. 
Djemal is not Pro-French; he is only the most 
calculating of all the leading men of Turkey. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 203 

He certainly had pro-French tendencies, in the 
current meaning of the word, before the war; 
that is, he thought the interests of his country 
would be best safeguarded against German 
machinations for winning over the Young 
Turks by taking advantage of Turkey's tradi- 
tional friendship for France. He was also 
against Turkey's participation in the war on 
the side of the Central Powers, and he was 
furiously angry when the fleet which was sup- 
posed to be under his control appeared against 
his will under the direction of the German Ad- 
miral of the Goeben and Breslau in the Black 
Sea. 

But when the war actually broke out, he 
very soon accommodated himself to the new 
state of affairs. Instead of handing in his 
resignation, he added to his naval duties the 
chief command of the army operating against 
Egypt, for Djemal's chief characteristics were 
characterless opportunism and inordinate am- 
bition. Suiting his opinions to the facts of the 
case, he was not long in advertising his Pro- 
French feelings again so that he might be 
popular with the people of Syria. That of 
course did not prevent him later on from car- 



204 TWO WAR YEARS 

rying out his "hangman's poHcy" against the 
Syrians who were bound by so many social 
ties to France. From that it is not difficult 
to judge just how genuine his Pro-French 
feelings are! 

The only genuine thing in his whole atti- 
tude is his admitted deep hatred of Germany 
and his personal animosity towards the pro- 
German Enver Pasha, arising partly from 
jealousy, partly from a feeling of being slight- 
ed, and only concealed for appearance' sake. 
During the war he has often enough made very 
plain utterances of his hatred of Germany, and 
it would certainly betoken ill for German poli- 
tics in Turkey if Djemal Pasha succeeded in 
obtaining a more active role in the Central 
Government. So far the Minister for War has 
managed to hold him at arm's length, and 
Djemal has no doubt found it of advantage to 
wait for a later moment, and content himself 
for the present with his actual powerful posi- 
tion. 

From his own repeated anti-German speech- 
es it has, however, been only too easy to glean 
that his anti-German opinions and actions are 
not the result of his being Pro-French, but 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 205 

of his being a jingoistic Pan-Turk. He may 
simulate Pro-French feehngs again and play 
them as the trump card in his surely approach- 
ing decisive struggle with Enver Pasha, when 
Enver's system has failed; Djemal will no 
doubt maintain then that he foresaw every- 
thing, and that he has always been for France 
and the Entente. Everyone who knows his 
character is at any rate sure of one thing, and 
that is that he will stop at nothing, even a ris- 
ing against the Central Government, if his 
ambitious opportunism should so dictate it. It 
is to be hoped, however, that public opinion 
among the Entente will not be deceived as to 
his true character, and will recognise that he is 
nothing more than a jingoistic, greedy, raging 
Young Turkish fanatic and one of the most 
cunning at that. It would really be doing too 
much honour to a man with a murderer's face 
and a murderer's instinct to credit him with 
honest sympathies for France. 

Djemal's work is nearing fruition. His 
cruel executions, his cynical breaking of prom- 
ises in Syria, have at any rate contributed, 
along with other politically more important 
tendencies which have been cleverly utilised by 



206 TWO WAR YEARS 

England for the establishment of an Arabian 
Caliphate, towards the decisive result that the 
Emir of Mecca has revolted against the Turks. 
The Emir's son and his great Arabian suite 
had to pay a prolonged visit to Djemal at one 
time, and it is evident that the brutal execution 
of Arabian notables that he saw then directly 
influenced his father's attitude. The move- 
ment is bound to spread, and slowly and surely 
it will roll on till it ends in the full and perfect 
separation from Turkey of all Arabic-speak- 
ing districts as far as Northern Syria and the 
borders of Southern Kurdistan. The so-called 
Separatist movement, that Djemal tried to 
drown in a sea of blood before it was well 
begun, is now an actual fact. 

In Egypt England has been seeing for quite 
a long time the practical and favourable results 
of her success in founding the Arabian Cali- 
phate. She has now gained practically abso- 
lute security for her rule on the Nile, and she 
has even been able to remove troops and artil- 
lery from the Suez Canal to other fronts. The 
German dream of an offensive against Egypt 
vanished long ago ; now even the last trace of a 
German-Turkish attempt against the Canal 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 207 

has ceased, and the English troops have moved 
the scene of their operations to Southern Pal- 
estine. While I write these lines, there comes 
from the other side, from Arabian Mesopo- 
tamia, the news of the recapture of Kut-el- 
Amara by British troops. I should not like 
to prophesy what moral or political results the 
fall of Baghdad, Medina, and Jerusalem will 
have for Turkish rule; possibly, nay probably, 
iron, necessity, the impossibility of returning, 
the constraint imposed by their German Al- 
lies — for Turkey is fully under German mili- 
tary rule — ^may weaken the direct results of 
even such catastrophes as these. But the 
hearts which beat to-day with high hopes for 
the freedom of Great Arabia and autonomy 
for Syria under Franco -English protection 
will flame with new rapture, and in the Tur- 
kish capital all grades of society will realise 
that Osmanic power is on the decline. 

Meantime Djemal Pasha is still occupied in 
Syria raking in the property of the murdered 
citizens and dividing it up among his minions, 
the least very often being given over to com- 
missions consisting of individuals of extreme- 
ly doubtful reputation. When he is not thus 



208 TWO WAR YEARS 

busily engaged, he spends his time round the 
green table playing poker. It is to be ardently 
hoped that even this great organiser will soon 
be at the end of his tether in Syria and have 
to leave the country where he has kinged in 
royally for two years. Then, perhaps, the 
moment may come when things are going so 
badly for the whole of Turkey that Djemal 
will at last have the opportunity, in spite of 
the failure of his policy in Syria, of measuring 
his military strength against his hated enemy 
Enver in Stamboul. That would be the be- 
ginning of the last stage before the complete 
collapse of Turkey. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 209 



CHAPTER IX 

Anti-war and pro-Entente feelings among the Turks — 
Turkish pessimism about the war — How would Ab- 
dul-Hamid have acted? — ^A war of prevention 
against Russia — Russia and a neutral Turkey — 
The agreement about the Dardanelles — A peaceful 
solution scorned — Alleged criminal intentions on the 
part of the Entente; the example of Greece and Sa- 
lonika — To be or not to be? — German influence — 
Turkey stakes on the wrong card — The results. 

There has been no lack of cross currents 
against the war policy of the Young Turkish 
Government. Ever since the entry of Turkey 
into the war, there has been a deeply rooted 
and unshakeable conviction among all kinds 
and conditions of men, even in the circles of 
the Pashas and the Court — the people of Tur- 
key take too httle interest in politics and are 
composed of far too heterogeneous elements 
for there to be anything in the nature of what 
we call "public opinion" — that Turkey's al- 
liance with the Central Powers was a complete 



210 TWO WAR YEARS 

mistake and that it can lead to no good. It is 
of course known that since the outbreak of 
war Turkey has not only been under martial 
law and in a state of siege, but that under the 
regime of a brutal military dictatorship, with 
its system of espionage, personal liberty has 
been practically null and void. Any expres- 
sions of disapproval, therefore, or agitations 
against the "Committee" are naturally only 
possible in most intimate circles, and that with 
all secrecy. Little or nothing of the true opin- 
ions of this or that personage ever trickles 
through to publicity, and so it is utterly im- 
possible, except from quite detached symp- 
toms, to get any proper idea of what are the 
real thoughts and feelings of those cultured 
Turks who do not belong to the "Ittihad" 
and have no part in their system of pillage and 
aggrandisement. 

In spite of the limited information available 
it will be worth while, I think, to go into these 
counter-streams a little more fully. In pretty 
well every grade of society and among all na- 
tionalities in Turkey, there is the conviction 
that the old Sultan Abdul-Hamid would never 
have committed the fateful error of declaring 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 211 

war against the Entente and binding himself 
hand and foot to Germany. In the case of 
Turkey's remaining neutral, the Entente had 
formally promised her territorial integrity; 
Turkey refused. She felt herself driven to a 
war of prevention, principally through fear of 
the power of Russia. The statements made by 
those who agreed with Enver and Pasha and 
pushed for the war, that Turkey in the case of 
non-participation would be completely thrown 
on the mercy of a victorious Russia and that 
Russia's true aim in the war was the Darda- 
nelles and Constantinople, have never been 
authenticated. There are still Turks, anti- 
Russian Turks, who even admitted this possi- 
bility, and yet believed the word of the En- 
tente — at any rate of the Western Powers — 
and trusted to England's throwing her weight 
into the scale against Russia's plans of con- 
quest, if Turkey remained neutral. They saw 
and still see no necessity for the Turkish Gov- 
ernment to have entered on a war of preven- 
tion. 

Russia's aim was the Straits and Constanti- 
nople — well and good. But Russia would by 
hook or by crook have had to come to a friendly 



212 TWO WAR YEARS 

agreement with Turkey and could not have 
simply broken a definite promise given by the 
combined Entente to Turkey. It would have 
been quite different if Russia had demanded 
Constantinople from the Western Powers as 
the price of her participation in the war against 
Germany; then, but only then, the Entente 
would perhaps have had to come to an agree- 
ment satisfying Russia on this head.^ But 
Russia had quite other ideas, and long before 
Turkey's entry into the war and without any 
prospects of getting Constantinople, she flung 
her whole weight against Germany and Aus- 
tria right at the beginning of the war. 

The treaty with regard to Constantinople 
between the Western Powers and Russia was 
not signed till six months after Turkey de- 
clared war, and England would certainly 
never have allowed Russia to encroach on a 
really neutral or sympathetically neutral 
Turkey. Then, but only then, there might 
have been some foundation in fact for the ideas 
one heard advanced by German-Turkish illu- 
sionists who would still have liked to believe 
that there was continual dissension within the 
Entente, even long after the official notification 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 213 

of the Anglo-Russian treaty with regard to the 
Straits, and by some even after the speech of 
the Russian minister Trepoff , that the EngHsh 
occupation of the islands at the entrance to the 
Dardanelles, which could be made into a 
second Gibraltar, aimed chiefly at blocking the 
Straits and preventing Russia from gaining 
undisturbed possession of Constantinople. 
Specially optimistic people even look to that 
chimerical antagonism between Russia and 
England for the salvation of Turkey, should 
Germany be finally overcome. 

Whether she liked it or not, then, Russia 
would have had to come to a friendly agree- 
ment with Turkey, had the latter remained 
neutral, in order to gain the desired goal. And 
this goal would have been necessarily limited, 
by the fact of Turkey's non-entry on the enemy 
side, rather to the stoppage of German Berlin- 
Baghdad efforts at expansion, the prevention 
of any strangulation of the enormous Russian 
trade in the south and desperate opposition to 
any attempt to keep Russia away from the 
Mediterranean, than to an attack on Turkey 
and her vital interests. And who knows 
whether under such an agreement, bound as 



214 TWO WAR YEARS 

it was to give Russia certain liberties and 
privileges in the Straits, Turkey also might not 
have got much in exchange, at any rate on 
financial lines, and might not also have ob- 
tained permission at last to develop Armenia 
by that west-to-east railway so long desired by 
the Turks and so strongly opposed by the Rus- 
sians ? 

Would the terrible bloodshed in the present 
war, the complete economic exhaustion en- 
tailed, and the risk of a doubtful outcome of 
the fight for existence or non-existence not 
have been far outweighed by the prospect, in 
the case of a friendly agreement with Russia, of 
seeing the orthodox cross again planted on the 
Hagia Sophia, an international regime estab- 
lished in Constantinople — with certain Russian 
privileges and the satisfaction of certain Rus- 
sian moral demands, it is true, but otherwise 
nothing to disturb Turkish life in Stamboul 
or in any way prejudice Turkish prestige? 
Even the prospect of having to raze the forts 
on the Straits to the ground in order to give 
free access from the Mediterranean, or the ne- 
cessity of having to inaugurate a more humane 
and beneficent policy in Armenia, perhaps with 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 215 

European supervision over the carrying out of 
the reforms would surely have been preferable 
to the present state of affairs. These would 
all have ensured for Turkey a long period of 
peace, capital wealth and intellectual and so- 
cial improvement, perhaps at the expense of a 
momentary hurt to her feelings, — ^but these 
had been far more severely wounded already, 
as, for example, when she had to look on help- 
lessly while bit after bit of her Empire was 
torn from her. It would have been impos- 
sible for Russia to get more than this from 
Turkey had she remained neutral. Her sov- 
ereignty and territorial integrity would have 
been completely guaranteed. 

But Turkey thought she had to stake all, her 
whole existence, on one card, and she staked 
on the wrong one, as is recognised now by thou- 
sands of intelligent Turks. Believers in the 
war policy followed by the Government make 
themselves hoarse maintaining that if Bussia 
had not gradually overpowered a neutral Tur- 
key to win Constantinople completely, at any 
rate the Entente would have finally forced her 
to join their side; in either case, therefore, war 
was inevitable. They point to Salonika, and. 



216 TWO WAR YEARS 

in face of all reason, maintain that the En- 
tente Powers would in all probability have 
treated Turkey exactly as they treated Greece. 
They forget that their geographical position 
is entirely different, and would have a very 
different effect on military tactics. If Turkey 
had remained a sympathetic neutral, so would 
Bulgaria; or else the whole of the Balkan 
States, from Roumania and Bulgaria to 
Greece, would have joined the Entente right 
at the beginning. In either case there would 
have been no necessity at all for Turkey to 
join, for what military obligations had she to 
fulfil? The Entente would certainly never 
have driven Turkey to fight, simply to get the 
benefit of the Turkish soldiers available ; there 
is no truth whatever in the statements circu- 
lated about unscrupulous compulsion with this 
end in view. 

The benefit for the Entente of Turkey's 
sympathetic neutrality would have been so 
enormous that they would most certainly have 
been content with that. Neither in Germany 
nor in Turkey is there any doubt whatever in 
military circles that it was Turkey's entry into 
the war on the German side and her blocking 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 217 

of the Straits, and so preventing Russia from 
obtaining supplies of ammunition and other 
war material, that has so far saved the Central 
Powers. Had Turkey remained neutral, con- 
stant streams of ammunition would have 
poured into Russia, Mackensen's offensive 
would have had no prospect at all of success, 
and Germany would have been beaten to all 
intents and purposes in 1915. The Turks do 
not scruple to let Germany feel that this is 
so on every suitable or unsuitable occasion. 

The Entente would certainly never have 
moved a finger to disturb Turkey's sympa- 
thetic neutrality and drive her into war. There 
would have been tremendous material advan- 
tages for Turkey in such a neutrality. Instead 
of being impoverished, bankrupt, utterly ex- 
hausted, wholly lost, as she now is, she might 
have been far richer than Roumania has ever 
been. There is one thing quite certain, and 
that is that Abdul-Hamid would never have let 
this golden opportunity slide of having a 
stream of money pouring in on himself and 
his country. And certainly Turkey would not 
have lacked moral justification had she so 
acted. 



218 TWO WAR YEARS 

These considerations I have put forward 
rather from the Turkish anti-war point of 
view than from my own. They are opinions 
expressed hundreds of times by thoroughly pa- 
triotic and intelligent Turks who saw how the 
ever more intensive propaganda work of the 
German Ambassadors, first Marschall von 
Bieberstein, then Freiherr von Wangenheim, 
gradually wormed its way through opposition 
and prejudice, how the German Military Mis- 
sion in Constantinople tried to turn the Rus- 
sian hatred of Germany against Turkey in- 
stead, how, finally, those optimists and jingo- 
ists on the "Committee," who knew as little 
about the true position of affairs throughout 
the world as they did of the intentions of the 
Entente or the means at their own disposal, 
proceeded to guide the ship of State more and 
more into German waters, without any refer- 
ence to their own people, in return for promises 
won from Germany of personal power and ma- 
terial advantage. These were those days of 
excitement and smouldering unrest when Ad- 
miral von Souchon of the Goehen and the Bres- 
lau, with complete lack of discipline towards 
his superior, Djemal Pasha, arranged with the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 219 

German Government to pull off a coup without 
Djemal's knowledge — chiefly because he was 
itching to possess the "Pour le Merite" order — 
and sailed off with the Turkish Fleet to the 
Black Sea. (I have my information from the 
former American Ambassador in Constantino- 
ple, Mr. Morgenthau, who was furious at the 
whole affair. ) ^ 

These were the days when Enver and Talaat 
threw all their cards on the table in that fate- 
ful game of To Be or Not to Be, and brought 
on their country, scarcely yet recovered from 
the bloodshed of the Balkan War, a new and 
more terrible sacrifice of her manhood in a war 
extending over four, and later five, fronts. 
The whole result of this struggle for existence 
depended on final victory for Germany and 
that was becoming daily more doubtful; in 
fact, Ottoman troops had at last to be dis- 
patched by German orders to the Balkans and 
Galicia. 

^ D j emal Pasha learnt the news that Admiral von 
Souchon had bombarded Russian ports, and so made war 
inevitable, one evening at the Club. Pale with rage, he 
sprang up and said: "So be it; but if things go wrong, 
Souchon will be the first to be hanged." 



220 TWO WAR YEARS 

Turkey had, too, to submit to the ignominy 
of making friends with her very recent enemy 
and preventing imminent military catastrophe 
by handing over the country along the Marit- 
za, right up to the gates of the sacred city of 
Adrianople, to the Bulgarians. She had to 
look on while Armenia was conquered by the 
Russians; while Mesopotamia and Syria, in 
spite of initial successes, were threatened by 
English troops; while the "Holy War" came 
to an untimely end, the most consecrated of 
all Islam's holy places, Mecca, fell away from 
Turkey, the Arabs revolted and the Cali- 
phate was shattered; while her population in 
the Interior endiu'ed the most terrible suf- 
ferings, and economic and financial life tended 
slowly and surely towards complete and hope- 
less collapse. 

Not even yet, indeed now less than ever, is 
there any general acceptance among the people 
of the views held by Enver and Talaat and 
their acolytes. Not yet do intelligent, inde- 
pendent men believe the fine phrases of these 
minions of the "Committee," who are held in 
leading strings by these dictators partly 
through gifts of money, ofiice, or the oppor- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 221 

tiinity to enrich themselves at the expense of 
the people, partly through fear of the conse- 
quences should they revolt, or of those domestic 
servants who call themselves deputies and sena- 
tors. On the contrary, it is no exaggeration to 
say that three-quarters of the intelligent out- 
and-out Turkish male population — quite apart 
from Levantines, Greeks, and Armenians — 
and practically the entire female population, 
who are more sensitive about the war and 
whose hearts are touched more deeply by its 
immeasurable suffering, have either remained 
perfectly friendly to England and France or 
have become so again through terrible want 
and suffering. 

The consciousness that Turkey has commit- 
ted ani unbounded folly has long ago been 
borne in upon wide circles of Turks in spite of 
falsified reports and a stringent censorship. 
There would be no risk at all in taking on a 
wager that in private conversation with ten 
separate Turks, in no way connected with the 
"Committee," nine of them will admit, as soon 
as they know there is no chance of betrayal, 
that they do not believe Turkey will win, and 
that, with the exception of the much-feared 



222 TWO WAR YEARS 

Russia, they still feel as friendly as ever 
towards their present enemies. ''Quoi qu^il 
arrive^ c'est toujours la pmivre Turquie qui va 
payer le pot casseJ" ("Whatever happens, 
it's always poor Turkey that'll have to pay the 
piper") and ''Nous avons fait une grande 
gaffe' ("We have put our foot in it") were 
the kind of remarks made in every single po- 
litical discussion I ever had in Constantinople 
— even with Turks. 

So much for the men, who judge with their 
reason. What of the women? The one sigh 
of cultured Turkish women, up to the highest 
in the land — ^who should have a golden book 
written in their honour for their readiness to 
help, their sympathy, and humanity in this 
war — is: "When shall we get rid of the 
Boches; when will our good old friends, the 
English and the French, come back to us?" 
Nice results, these, of German propaganda, 
German culture, German brotherhood of 
arms! What a sad and shameful story for a 
German to have to tell ! Naturally the drastic 
system of the military dictatorship precludes 
the public expression of such feelings, but one 
needs only have seen with one's own eyes the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 223 

looks so often cast by even real Turkish cul- 
tured society at the German Feldgrauen who 
often marched in close formation through the 
streets of Constantinople — for a time they 
used to sing German soldiers' songs, until that 
was prohibited at the express wish of the Tur- 
kish Government to see how the land lies. 

There was a marked and ill-concealed con- 
trast in the coldness shown to Imperial Ger- 
man officers and the lavish affection showered 
on the Austrians and Hungarians who used for 
a time often to pass through Constantinople on 
their way to the Dardanelles or Anatolia with 
their heavy artillery. They were a great deal 
more sociable than their German comrades, 
and oi]fe could not fail to note the significance 
of such freely voiced comments as ^'N'est-ce 
pas, lis sont charmants les Autrichiensf' 
("The Austrians are delightful, aren't they?") 
The sight of us Germans, especially the very 
considerable German garrison stationed for a 
time in the Capital, awakened in the Turks, 
however much they might recognise the mili- 
tary necessity for their presence, remarkable 
ideas about the future "German Egyptising of 
Turkey," and everyone blamed Enver Pasha 



224 TWO WAR YEARS 

as the man responsible for Germany's pene- 
trating thus far. 

A Turk in a high official position — ^whose 
name I shall naturally not divulge — even went 
so far as to say to me in an intimate personal 
discussion we were having one day between 
friend and friend: "We Turks are and will 
always remain, in spite of the war, pro-Eng- 
lish and pro-French so far as social and intel- 
lectual life is concerned; and it would need 
twenty years of hard propaganda work on 
Germany's part, quite different from her 
present methods, to change this point of view, 
if it ever could be changed." He went on to 
recall the time of the pro-English era, and the 
enthusiastic demonstrations that had taken 
place at the Sirkedji station when the horses 
were taken out of the English Ambassador's 
carriage. "I was there myself," he said, "and 
believe me, apart from the war, heaps of us 
are at bottom still of the same mind." And, 
growing heated, he added: "What is your 
Embassy, tell me? Is it really an Embassy? 
No representation, no intimate intercourse 
with us, or at best only with your political 
agents, no personal charm, nothing but brusque 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 225 

demands and a most humiliating economic neg- 
lect of the Turkish population. The English 
and the French and even the Russians would 
treat us quite differently." 

This man is no exception in his ideas. He 
is a thorough Young Turk, who holds with the 
"Committee" through thick and thin and has 
to thank them for a very pleasant billet, but 
he is, besides, a youngish man with a modern 
European education. He is thoroughly im- 
bued, as are all of his kind, with modern French 
ideas, and even the war cannot alter that. It 
only needs the final collapse of the Central 
Powers, and then the break-down of the whole 
political system under the direction of these 
jingoistic emancipationists who think they can 
get on without Europe, and the Turks will all, 
every one of them, be as thoroughly pro-Eng- 
lish and pro-French as they ever were and will 
hate Germany and everything German with 
fanatical hatred. 

Towards Hungary, their blood relation, they 
will probably retain some friendliness in mem- 
ory of their alliance in the Great War and the 
cause of Turanism; they will be quite indiffer- 
ent to Bulgaria; they will lose their fear of 



226 TWO WAR YEARS 

Russia and come to an agreement with her; 
but after the war there will be no bridging the 
gulf between Turkey and Germany, and if 
Germany, on the conclusion of peace, is allot- 
ted any part of smaller Turkey by the rest of 
the European Powers, she will have to reckon 
for many a long year with the very chilly rela- 
tions that will exist between Germans and 
Turks. Even those who went heart and soul 
into the war as a war of defence against Tur- 
key's powerful northern neighbour foresee that 
when peace is declared Turkey will, so far as 
her enormous indebtedness to Germany per- 
mits, rather throw herself on the mercy of Eng- 
land and France and America and beg from 
them the capital necessary for reconstruction 
and for freeing them from the hated German 
influence — an aversion which is already evident 
in hundreds of different ways. Even Germany 
is beginning to recognise the existence of this 
tendency, which, hand in hand with the jingo- 
istic attempt to turkify commercial life, bodes 
ill for German activity in Turkey after the 
war. 

These are the opinions of the educated 
classes. The people, however, the poor, igno- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 227 

rant Turkish people, were ready long ago to 
accept any solution that would liberate them 
from their terrible sufferings. The Turkish 
people have not the mental calibre of our Ger- 
man people which will perhaps make them fight 
on, just for the sake of leaving no stone un- 
turned, even after it is quite evident that they 
are tending towards final collapse. The stake 
for which they are fighting is not so valuable 
to this agricultural people, who with an in- 
ferior and extortionate set of rulers have never 
been able really to enjoy life, as it is to the 
population of a modern industrial country like 
Germany, where every political gain or loss has 
a direct result on their own pockets ; defeat will 
certainly have much less effect on the Oriental. 
One can therefore speak with confidence of a 
general longing for the end of the war at any 
price. The Turks have had quite enough of 
suffering, and there are limits to what even 
these willing and mutely resigned victims can 
bear. 

Nevertheless it is quite certain that the cour- 
ageous Turkish soldier, in obedience to iron 
discipline and in unconditional submission to 
his Padishah, will continue to defend his lost 



228 TWO WAR YEARS 

cause to the very last drop of his blood, with an 
unquestioning resignation that absolutely pre- 
cludes the idea of any defection within the 
army. Only a purely political military revo- 
lution, originating with the better-informed of- 
ficers, who now really no longer believe in ulti- 
mate victory, is within the bounds of possibil- 
ity. 

But the most confiding endurance on the 
part of the Turkish soldier, even when the mili- 
tary cause has long been lost, will not hinder 
this same soldier, when he is once more back 
in his own home as a peasant, from realising 
that European influence and European civil- 
isation are a very competent protection against 
the miserably retrogressive Turkish rule, and 
that he has drawn more material profit from 
that single example of European activity, the 
Baghdad Railway, than from all Turkish offi- 
cial reforms put together, and so would willing- 
ly see Europe exercising a powerful control in 
his country. He would accept the military col- 
lapse of his country which he had so long and 
so bravely defended, and the dramatic political 
changes, with a quietly submissive ''Inshallah." 
And although, deprived as he is of every kind 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 229 

of information and without even the begin- 
nings of knowledge, he perhaps still believes in 
ultimate victory for the Padishah, he will prob- 
ably heave a sigh of relief when the unexpected 
collapse comes, and he will not take long to 
understand what it means for him: freedom 
and happiness and an undreamt-of material 
well-being under strong European influence. 

The late successor to the throne. Prince 
Yussuf Izzedin Effendi, was the highest of 
those in high authority who openly represented 
the pessimistic anti-war tendency. It was for 
this that he was murdered or perhaps made to 
comiTiit suicide by Enver Pasha. The whole 
truth about this tragic occurrence can only be 
sifted to the bottom when the dictators of the 
"Committee" are no longer in their place and 
light finally breaks on Turkey. Whether it 
was murder or suicide, the death of the suc- 
cessor to the throne is one of the most dramatic 
scandals of Turkish history, and Enver Pasha 
has his blood, as well as the blood of so many 
others, on his head. As far as is possible dur- 
ing the war, Europe has already collected all 
the information available on the subject. I my- 
self was in Constantinople when the tragic oc- 



230 TWO WAR YEARS 

currence took place, and I can speak so far 
from personal experience. 

In connection with this sensational event, 
the world has already heard how Yussuf Izze- 
din was kept for years under the despotic Ab- 
dul-Hamid shut off from the world as a semi- 
prisoner in his beautiful Konak of Sindjirli- 
kuyu, just outside the gates of Constantinople, 
where he became a sufferer from acute neu- 
rasthenia. In recent years, however, his health 
had improved and, although latently hostile to 
the men of the "Committee" ancj their politics, 
he had come more into the foreground, espe- 
cially after the recapture of Adrianople, which 
he visited with full pomp and ceremony as 
Crown Prince of the Turkish Empire. While 
the Gallipoli campaign was going on, he even 
made a journey to the r'ront to greet his sol- 
diers. Early one morning he was found lying 
dead in a pool of his own blood with a severed 
artery. He had received his death wound in 
exactly the same place and exactly the same 
way as his father. Sultan Abdul- Aziz, who fell 
a victim to Abdul-Hamid's hatred. The politi- 
cal significance of Yussuf Izzedin's death is 
perfectly clear. What we want to do now is 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 231 

to demonstrate Enver Pasha's moral culpabil- 
ity in the matter and to show how he was more 
or less directly the murderer of this quiet, cul- 
tured, highly respected, and thoroughly pa- 
triotic man, who was some day to ascend the 
throne of Turkey. 

So much at least seems to be clear, that 
Prince Izzedin, who was naturally interested 
in retaining his accession to the throne undis- 
turbed and who in spite of his neurasthenia 
was man enough to stand up for his own rights, 
foresaw ruin for his kingdom by Turkey's en- 
try into the war on the side of Germany. He 
was more far-seeing than the careless adven- 
turers and narrow-minded fanatics of the 
"Committee" and recognised that the letting- 
go of the treasured Pan-Islamic traditions of 
old Sultan Hamid was a grave mistake which 
would lead to the alienation of the Arabs, and 
which endangered both the Ottoman Cali- 
phate and Ottoman rule in the southern parts 
of the Empire. He could not console himself 
for the evacuation of the territory round 
Adrianople, right up to the gates of the sacred 
city, which meant much to him as the symbol 
of national enlightenment. He had a real per- 



232 TWO WAR YEARS 

sonal dislike for upstarts of the stamp of Enver 
and Talaat. Apart from these differences of 
opinion and personal sympathies and antip- 
athies, deep-rooted though these undoubtedly 
were, Yussuf Izzedin was and always would 
have been a thorough "Osmanli" with fiery na- 
tionalistic feelings, who ^vished for nothing but 
the good of his Empire and his country. And 
yet he was got rid of. 

It would be difficult for the present Turkish 
Government to prove that the successor to the 
throne, apart from his feeling of sorrow that his 
country had been drawn into the war, apart 
from his readiness to conclude an honourable 
separate peace at the first possible moment, did 
anything which might have caused them 
trouble. The officials of the Turkish Govern- 
ment had themselves made repeated efforts 
through their Swiss Ambassadors to find out 
how the land lay, and whether they could con- 
clude a separate peace; so they had no grounds 
at all for reproaching Prince Yussuf Izzedin, 
who, as a leader of this movement, naturally let 
no opportunity of this kind slide. But he was 
far too clever not to know that any attempt in 
this direction behind the backs of the present 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 233 

Government would have no chance of success 
so long as Turkey was held under the iron fist 
of Germany. 

Perhaps the "Committee" had something to 
fear for the future, when the time came for the 
reverses now regarded as inevitable. Yussuf 
would then make use of his powerful influence 
in many circles — notably among the discon- 
tented retired military men — to demand re- 
dress from the "Committee." Enver, true to 
his unscrupulous character, quite hardened to 
the sight of Turkish blood, and determined to 
stick to his post at all costs — for it was not only 
lucrative, but flattering to his vanity — was not 
the man to stick at trifles with a poor neuras- 
thenic, who under the present military dicta- 
torship was absolutely at his mercy. He there- 
fore decided on cold-blooded murder. 

The Prince, well aware of the danger that 
threatened him, tried at the last moment to 
leave the country and flee to safety. He had 
even taken his ticket, and intended to start by 
the midday Balkan train next day to travel to 
Switzerland via Germany. He was forbidden 
to travel. Whether, feeling himself thus driven 
into a corner and nothing but death at the hand 



234 TWO WAR YEARS 

of Enver's creatures staring him in the face, 
he killed himself in desperation, or whether, as 
thousands of people in Constantinople firmly 
believe, and as would seem to be corroborated 
by the generally accepted, although of course 
not actually verified, tale of a bloody encounter 
between the murderers and the Prince's body- 
guard, with victims on both sides, he was ac- 
tually assassinated, is not yet settled, and it is 
really not a matter of vast importance. 

One thing is clear, and that is that Izzedin 
Effendi did not pay with his life for any illoyal 
act, but merely for his personal and political 
opposition to Enver. He is but one on this 
murderer's long list of victims. The numer- 
ous doctors, all well known creatures of the 
"Committee" or easily won over by intimida- 
tion, who set their names as witnesses to this 
"suicide as a result of severe neurasthenia" — 
a most striking and suspicious similarity to the 
case of Abdul- Aziz — ^have not prevented one 
single thinking man in Constantinople from 
forming a correct opinion on the matter. The 
wily Turkish Government evidently chose this 
kind of death, just like his father's, so that 
they could diagnose the symptoms as those of 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 235 

incurable neurasthenia. History has already 
formed its own opinion as to how much free- 
will there was in Abdul- Aziz' death ! The opin- 
ions of different people about Prince Yussuf 's 
death only differ as to whether he was mur- 
dered or compelled to commit suicide. ''On Va 
suicide^,'' was the ironical and frank comment 
of one clever Old Turk. We will leave it at 
that. 

The funeral of the successor to the throne 
was a most interesting sight. I sent an article 
on it to my paper at the time, which of course 
had only very, very slight allusions to any- 
thing of a sinister character ; but it did not find 
favour with the censor at the Berlin Foreign 
Office. The editorial staff of the paper evi- 
dently saw what I was driving at, and wrote 
to me : '* We have revised and touched up your 
report so as at least to save the most essential 
part of it ;" but even the altered version did not 
pass the censor's blue pencil. But I had at 
any rate the moral satisfaction of knowing that 
of all the papers with correspondents in the 
Turkish capital, mine, the Kolnische Zeitung, 
was the only one that could publish nothing, 
not a single line, about this important and 



236 TWO WAR YEARS 

highly sensational occurrence, for I simply 
wrote nothing more. That was surely clear 
enough ! 

When in 1913, after the unsuccessful coun- 
ter-revolution, Mahmud Shevket Pasha was 
assassinated and was going to be buried in Con- 
stantinople, the ''Committee" issued invita- 
tions days beforehand to all foreign person- 
ages. This time nothing of the sort happened ; 
and even the Press representatives were not 
invited to be present. On the former occasion 
everything possible was done, by putting off 
the interment as long as possible and repeat- 
edly publishing the date, by lengthening the 
route of the funeral procession, to give several 
thousands of people an opportunity of taking 
part in the ceremony. 

This time, however, the authorities arranged 
the burial with all speed, and the very next day 
after the sensational occurrence the body was 
hurried by the shortest way, through the Giil- 
hane Park, to the Mausoleum of Sultan Mah- 
mud-Moshee. The coffin had been quietly 
brought in the twilight the evening before 
from the Kiosk of Sindjirlikuyu on the other 
side of Pera on the Maslak Hill, to the top of 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 237 

the Serail. Along the whole route, however, 
wherever the public had access, there were lines 
of police and soldiers ; and the bright uniforms 
of the police who were inserted in groups of 
twenty between every single row of the pro- 
cession of Ministers, members of the "Com- 
mittee" and delegaters who walked behind the 
coffin, were really the most conspicuous thing 
in the whole ceremony. Enver Pasha passed 
quite close to me, and neither I, nor my com- 
panions, could fail to note the ill-concealed ex- 
pression of satisfaction on his face. 

The most beautiful thing about this whole 
funeral, however, was the visit paid me by the 
Secretary-General of the Senate, the minute 
after I had reached home (and I had driven 
by the shortest way) . With a zeal that might 
have surprised even the simplest minded of 
men, he offered to tell me about the Prince's 
life, lingering long and going into exhaustive 
detail over the well-known facts of his nerv- 
ous ailment. Then, blushing at his own awk- 
wardness and importunity, he begged me most 
earnestly to publish his version of all the de- 
tails and circumstances of this tragic occur- 
rence, "which no other paper will be in a posi- 



238 TWO WAR YEARS 

tion to publish." Naturally it was never writ- 
ten. 

So, once more, in the late summer of 1916, 
Enver Pasha, who was so fond of discovering 
conspiracies and political movements in order 
to get rid of his enemies, and go scot free him- 
self, had a fresh opportunity of reflecting, with 
even more foundation than usual, on the firm- 
ness of his position and the security of his own 
life. 

It is perhaps time now to give a more com- 
prehensive description of this man. We have 
already mentioned in connection with the fail- 
ure of his Caucasus off*ensive that Enver has 
been extraordinarily overestimated in Europe. 
The famous Enver is neither a prominent in- 
tellectual leader nor a good organiser — in this 
direction he is far surpassed by Djemal Pasha 
— nor an important strategist. In military 
matters his positive qualities are personal cour- 
age, optimism, and, consequently, initiative 
which is never daunted by fear of consequences, 
also cold-bloodedness and determination; but 
he is entirely lacking in judgment, power of 
discrimination, and largeness of conception. 
From the German point of view he is particu- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 239 

larly valuable for his unquestioning and uncon- 
ditional association with the Central Powers, 
his readiness to do anything that will further 
their cause, his pliability and his zeal in accom- 
modating himself even to the most trenchant 
reforms. But it is just these qualities that 
make enemies for him among retired military 
men and among the people. 

Regarded from a purely personal point of 
view, Enver Pasha is, in spite of the fulsome 
praise showered on him by Germans inspired 
by that most pliant implement, German mili- 
tarism, one of the most repugnant subjects 
ever produced by Turkey. Even from a purely 
external point of view his appearance does not 
at all correspond with the picture of him gen- 
erally accepted in Germany from flattering re- 
ports and falsified photographs. Small of stat- 
ure, with quite an ordinary face, he looks 
rather, as one of my journalistic colleagues 
said, like a "gardener's boy" than a Vice-Gen- 
eral and War Minister, and anyone who ever 
has the opportunity I have so often had, of 
looking really closely at him, will certainly be 
repelled by his look of vanity and cunning. It 
was really most painful to have to listen to him 



240 TWO WAR YEARS 

(he has always been a bad and monotonous 
speaker) in the Senate and the Lower House 
at the conclusion of the Dardanelles campaign 
reading his report in a weak, halting voice, but 
with the disdainful tone of a dictator. Every 
third word was an "I." Even the Turkish 
Press accorded this parliamentary speech a 
fairly frosty reception. 

Besides this, Enver is one of the most cold- 
blooded liars imaginable. Time and again 
there has been no necessity for him to say cer- 
tain things in Parliament, or to make certain 
promises, but apparently he found cynical en- 
joyment in making the people and Parliament 
feel their whole inferiority in his eyes. What 
can one think, for example, of such perform- 
ances as this? At the end of 1916 when the 
discussion about military service for those who 
had paid the exemption tax {bedel) was going 
on, he gave an unsolicited and solemn assur- 
ance before the whole House that he had no 
intention whatever of calling up certain classes 
until the Bill had been finally passed and that 
it would show that he was really desirous of 
sparing commercial life as far as possible in 
the calling up of men. Exactly two hours after 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 241 

this speech the drum resounded through all 
the streets of Stamhoul and Pera, calling up 
all those classes over which Enver had as yet 
no power of jurisdiction, and which he said 
he wanted to keep back because to tear them 
away from their employment would mean the 
complete disorganisation of the already sadly 
disordered commercial life of the country. 

This was Talaat's opinion, too, and he of- 
fered a firm resistance to Enver's plan, which 
it appears had been introduced by command 
of the German Government. In this case, 
however, resistance was useless, and had to give 
way to military necessity. If Enver said some- 
thing in Parliament — this at any rate was the 
general conclusion — one might be quite certain 
that exactly the opposite would take place. He 
has now gained for himself the reputation of 
being a liar and a murderer among all those 
who are not followers of the "Committee." 

In contrast to Talaat, who is at least intelli- 
gent enough to keep up appearances and cun- 
ning enough to hold himself well in the back- 
ground, Enver's personal lack of integrity in 
money matters is a subject of most shameful 
knowledge in Constantinople. It is pretty well 



242 TWO WAR YEARS 

generally known how he has made use of his 
position as Military Dictator to gain posses- 
sion for himself of property worth thousands 
of pounds, and how in his financial dealings 
with Germany hundreds have found their way 
into his own pocket — up till the winter of 
1915-1916, according to an estimate from con- 
fidential Turkish circles and from German 
sources I will not name, he had already man- 
aged to collect something like two million 
pounds, reckoned in English money. This son 
of a former lowly condwcteur in the service of 
the Roads and Bridges Board, whose mother, 
as I have been assured by Turks is the case, 
plied in Stamboul the much-despised trade of 
"layer-out" of corpses, now lives in his Konak 
in more than princely luxury, with flowers and 
silver and gold on his table, having married, 
out of pure ambition, a very plain-looking 
princess. That is the true portrait of this 
much-coddled darling of the Young Turks, 
and latterly of the German people as well. 
This is the idol of so many admiring German 
women, who are bewitched by his more than 
adventurous career and the halo surrounding 
him which he has enhanced by every known 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 243 

and unknown means of self-advertisement. 
Enver's character won for him in "Com- 
mittee" circles personal dislike and bitter, 
though veiled, enmity even from his colleagues 
who were of exactly the same political per- 
suasion as himself. Of his relations towards 
the infinitely more important Djemal Pasha 
we have already spoken; we shall speak in a 
moment of his relations to Talaat. In the 
world of the retired military men, however, 
who had been badgered about by Enver, neg- 
lected and simply forcibly pensioned off by 
hundreds before the war because of their di- 
vergent political opinions, and even thrown 
into the street, the War Minister was heartily 
hated. A very large part of them were of 
the same political views as the murdered suc- 
cessor to the throne, and their opinion of the 
Great War was as we have already indicated. 
They pointed bitterly to Enver as the all-too- 
pliable servant of Germany, who was only too 
ready to sacrifice the flower of Ottoman youth 
on those far battlefields of Galicia at a sign 
from the German Staff, and open door after 
door to German influence in the Interior with- 



2M TWO WAR YEARS 

out even attempting to protect the land of his 
fathers from invasion and decay. 

As we have said, political revolutions in 
Turkey usually start in military circles, not 
among the people, and there was an actual at- 
tempt in this direction in the autumn of 1916. 
Either by chance or by someone's betraying 
the plot, it was discovered by Enver in time, 
and the number of military men and Old Turk- 
ish personages associated with them, impris- 
oned in Constantinople alone, reached six hun- 
dred. At the head of the movement stood 
Major Yakub Djemil Bey. 

During the whole of the summer of 1916 
Enver 's position had been looked upon as quite 
insecure. The knowledge of his greed in money 
matters, his tactless pushing, and his ruthless 
brutality had totally alienated a wide circle of 
people, and many believed that he would soon 
have to resign. 

In addition to this, a deep inward antago- 
nism reigned between him and Talaat, the real 
leader and by far the most important states- 
man of Turkey, which was far more than a 
cleverly veiled personal dislike. There was 
a constant struggle for power going on be- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 245 

tween the two men. By the end of May the 
crisis had become pretty acute, although out- 
ward appearances were still preserved and only 
well-informed circles knew anything at all 
about the matter. Enver had at that time to 
hurry back from the Irak, where he was on a 
visit of inspection with the German Chief of 
Staff and the Military Attache, in order to 
safeguard his post. In confidential circles, the 
outbreak of open enmity between the two was 
fully expected ; but this time again Talaat was 
the cleverer. He felt that, in spite of his own 
greater influence and following, in spite of his 
real superiority to Enver, he might perhaps, 
if he tried conclusions with him while he was 
still in command of the army, find himself the 
loser and, in view of Enver's murderous habits, 
pay for his rashness with his life. So he de- 
cided not to risk a decisive battle just yet. He 
was too patriotic, also, to let things come to an 
open break during the difficult time of war. 
Talaat disappeared for a short time on a visit 
of inspection to Angora, and things settled 
down to their old way again. 

There is still internal conflict going on. But 
Enver, with boundless ambition and no fine 



246 TWO WAR YEARS 

feelings of honour, clings to his post, and has 
shown by the way he dealt with the instigators 
of the conspiracy mentioned above that noth- 
ing but force will move him from his post, and 
that he will never yield to public opinion or 
the criticism of his colleagues. He was troubled 
by no qualms, in spite of the widely circulated 
opinion that he would certainly jeopardise his 
life if he went on in the same ruthless way to- 
wards the retired military men. He simply had 
the leader, Yakub Djemil Bey, hanged like a 
common criminal, and the whole of his follow- 
ers, for the most part superior officers and 
highly respected persons, turned into soldiers 
of the second class, and put in the front-line 
trenches. 

Enver's removal would not alter the whole 
Young Turkish regime much, but it would take 
from it much of its ruthless barbarity, and its 
most repugnant representative would vanish 
from the picture. It would also be a severe 
blow for Germany and her militaristic policy 
of driving Turkey mercilessly to suicide. It 
would be a godsend to the anti-German Dje- 
mal Pasha. From a political point of view it 
would mean, far more than Talaat's appoint- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 247 

ment as Grand Vizier, the absolute supremacy 
of that statesman. 

At bottom probably less ruthless than Enver 
and certainly cleverer, there is no doubt but 
that he would pursue his jingoistic ideas in the 
realm of race-politics, but at any rate he would 
not want any military system of frightfulness. 
Enver 's removal from office will come within 
the range of near possibility as soon as the new 
British operations against Southern Palestine 
and Mesopotamia have produced a real vic- 
tory. Turkey is not in a good enough military 
position to prevent this, and the whole world 
will soon recognise that it is this servant of 
Germany, this careless optimist and very medi- 
ocre strategist who is to blame for the inexora- 
ble breaking-up of the Ottoman Empire. 

The contrast I have noted between Enver 
and Talaat provides the opportunity for say- 
ing a few words about Talaat, now Pasha and 
Grand Vizier, and by far the most important 
man of New Turkey. As Minister of the In- 
terior, he has guided the whole fate of his coun- 
try, except in purely military matters, as un- 
crowned king. It is he more than anyone else 
who is the originator of the whole system of 



248 



TWO WAR YEARS 



home politics. Solidity of character, earnest- 
ness, freedom from careless optimism, and con- 
spicuous power of judgment distinguish him 
most favourably from Enver, who possesses 
the opposite of all these qualities. A high de- 
gree of intelligence, an enormous knowledge 
of men, an exceptional gift of organisation and 
tireless energy combined with great personal 
authority, prudence and reserve, calm weigh- 
ing of the actual possibilities — in a word, all 
the qualities of the real statesman — raise him 
head and shoulders above the whole of his col- 
leagues and co-workers. It would be unjust 
to doubt his ardent patriotism or the honesty 
of his ideas and intentions. Talaat's character 
is so impressive that one often hears even Ar- 
menians, the victims of his own original policy 
of persecution, speak of him with respect, and 
I have even heard the opinion expressed that 
had it not been for Talaat's cleverness, the 
Coromittee would have gone much further with 
their mischievous policy. 

But his high intellectual abilities do not pre- 
vent him from suffering from that same plague 
of narrow-minded, jingoistic illusion peculiar 
to the Pan-Turks. He is as if intoxicated with 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 249 

a race-fanaticism that stifles all nobler emo- 
tions. Talaat is too methodical and clever not 
to avoid all intentional ruthlessness, but in 
practice his system, which he follows out with 
inflexible logic to the bitter end, turns out to 
be just as brutal as Enver's intrinsically more 
brutal policy. And although he accommodates 
himself outwardly to modern European meth- 
ods and knows how to utilise them, the ethics 
of his system are out-and-out Asiatic. When 
Talaat speaks in the "Committee," there is 
very rarely the slightest opposition. He has 
usually prepared and coached the "Commit- 
tee" so well beforehand that he can to all ap- 
pearance keep in the background and only fol- 
low the majority. With the exception of a few 
military affairs, everything has always taken 
place that he has proposed in Parliament. 

Beside this man, whose sparkling eyes, mas- 
sive shoulders, broad chest, clean-cut profile 
and exuberant health denote the whole un- 
bounded energy of the dictator, the good-na- 
tured, degenerate, and epileptically inclined 
Sultan, Mehmed V, "El Ghazi" ("the hero"), 
is but a weak shadow. But if we fully recognise 
Talaat's high intellectual qualities, we should 



250 TWO WAR YEARS 

like all the more to emphasise that he must be 
held personally responsible more than all the 
others for everything that is now happening in 
Turkey, so far as it is not of a military charac- 
ter. The spirit reigning in Turkey to-day, the 
spirit of Pan-Turkish jingoism, is Talaat's 
spirit. The Armenian persecutions are his very 
own work. And when the day of reckoning 
comes for the Turkey of the "Committee of 
Union and Progress," it is to be hoped that 
Europe as judge and chastiser and avenger of 
an outraged civilisation, will lay the chief 
blame on Talaat Pasha rather than on his far 
weaker colleague Enver. 

All his eminent qualities, however, do not 
prevent this intellectual leader of Turkey, the 
most important man, beside the Sultan, in the 
land, from showing signs of something that is 
typical of the whole "Committee" clique with 
their dictatorial power, and which we may per- 
haps be allowed to call parvenuishness. At all 
points we see the characteristics of the parvenu 
in this statesman and one-time adventurer and 
in these creatures of the "Committee" who have 
recently become wealthy by certain abuses — I 
would remind you only of the Requisitions^ — 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 251 

and by a lucrative adherence to the ruling 
clique. There are of course individual cases 
of distinguished men of good birth throwing 
in their lot with the "Committee," but they are 
extremely rare, and they only help to give an 
even worse impression of the average Young 
Turk belonging to the Government. Their past 
is usually extremely doubtful, and their careers 
have been somewhat varied. 

No one of course would ever think of set- 
ting it down as a black mark against Talaat, 
for example, that he had to work his way up 
to his present supreme position from the very 
modest occupation of postman and postal 
coach conductor on the Adrianople road, via 
telegraph assistant and other branches of the 
Post Office; on the contrary, such intelligence 
and energy are worthy of the highest praise. 
But Talaat's case is a comparatively good one, 
and it is not so much their low social origin that 
is a drawback to these political leaders of Tur- 
key, as their complete lack of education in 
statesmanship and history, which unfits them 
for the high role they are called upon to fill. 
Naturally it is not exactly pleasant when a man 
like Herr Paul Weitz, the correspondent of 



252 TWO WAR YEARS 

the Frankfurter Zeitvmg, and a political agent, 
can boast with a certain amount of justifica- 
tion that he has given tips of money to many of 
the present members of the "Committee" — in 
the real sense of the word, not in the political 
meaning of backshish! It is no wonder, then, 
that German influence won its way through so 
easily ! 

Even yet Talaat's lowly origin is a draw- 
back to him socially, and, in spite of his jovial 
manner and his complete confidence in his own 
powers, he sometimes feels himself so unsure 
that he rather avoids social duties. Probably 
one of the reasons of his long delay in accept- 
ing the post of Grand Vizier — he was already 
definitely marked out for it in the summer of 
1915 — ^was his own inner consciousness that his 
whole past life unfitted him socially for the 
duties of such an ofiice. That he has now de- 
cided to accept it, is only the logical sequence 
of the system of absolute Turkification, which, 
with its plan of muzzling and supplanting all 
non-Turkish elements, had of course to get rid 
of the Egyptian element in the Government, 
represented by Prince Halim Said, the late 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 253 

Grand Vizier, and his brother, the late Minister 
of Public Works. 

There are far more outstanding cases of in- 
compatibility between social upbringing and 
present activity among the "Committee." I 
will simply take the single example of the Di- 
rector General of the Press, Hikmet Bey. Mis- 
chievous Pera still gives him the nickname of 
"Siltdji' ("milkman"), because — although it 
is no reproach to him any more than in Talaat's 
case — ^he still kept his father's milk shop in the 
Rue Tepe Bashi in Pera before he managed to 
get himself launched on a political career by 
close adherence to the Committee. Sometimes, 
of course, one inherits from a low social origin 
far worse things than social inferiority. Per- 
haps Djemal Pasha's murderous instincts are 
to be traced to the fact that his grandfather 
was the official hangman in the service of Sul- 
tan Mahmud, and that his father still retained 
the nick-name of "hangman" among the peo- 
ple. 

One only needs to cast a glance at the Young 
Turks who are the leaders of fashion in the 
"Club de Constantinople" — after the English 
and French members are absent — with Ger- 



254 TWO WAR YEARS 

man officers who have been admitted as tem- 
porary members at a reduced subscription, and 
one will find there, as in the more exclusive 
"Cercle d'Orient," and in the "Yachting Club" 
in Prinkipo in the summer-time, individuals be- 
longing to the "Committee" whose lowly origin 
and bad manners are evident at the first glance. 
Talaat, who is himself President of the Club, 
knows exactly how to get his adherents elected 
as members without one of them being black- 
balled. People who used not to know what an 
International Club was, and who perhaps, in 
accordance with their former social status, got 
as far as the vestibule to speak to the Con- 
cierge, are now great "club men" and can af- 
ford, with the money they have amassed in 
"clique" trade and by the famous system of 
Requisitions, to play poker every evening for 
stakes of hundreds of Turkish pounds. One 
single kaleidoscopic glance into the perpetual 
whirl of any one of these clubs, which used to 
be places of friendly social intercourse for the 
best European circles, is quite sufficient to see 
the class of degenerate, greedy parvenus that 
rule poor, bleeding, helpless, exhausted Tur- 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 255 

key. One cannot but be filled with a deep sym- 
pathy for this unfortunate land. 

The Turks of decent birth are disgusted at 
these parvenus. I have had conversations with 
many an old Pasha and Senator, true repre- 
sentatives of the refined and kindly Old Turk- 
ish aristocracy, and heard many a word of stern 
disapproval of the "Committee" quite apart 
from their divergent political opinions. There 
is a whole distinguished Turkish world in Con- 
stantinople who completely boycott Enver and 
his consorts socially, although they have to put 
up with their caprices politically. "I don't 
know Enver at all," or ''Je ne connais pas ces 
gens-la^ ("I don't know these people"), are 
phrases that one very often hears repeated with 
infinite disdain. In all these cases it is the 
purely personal side — birth and manners — that 
repels them. 

Socially the cleft between the two camps is 
far deeper than it is politically, for many of 
these same people accommodate themselves, 
though with reluctance in their heart, to shar- 
ing at least formally as Senators in the re- 
sponsibility for the present Young Turkish 
policy. They have to do so, for otherwise they 



256 TWO WAR YEARS 

would simply be flung mercilessly by Enver's 
Clique on to the streets to beg for bread. This 
is how it comes about to-day that, with very few 
exceptions, the Senators, who, to tell the truth, 
have as little practical say as the members of 
the Lower House, are all outwardly complai- 
sant followers of the "Committee." The more 
doctrinal, but at any rate courageous and hon- 
ourable opposition of Ahmed Riza is likewise 
of very little significance. Once, about the 
middle of December, 1916, Enver even went so 
far as to hurl the epithet "shameless dog" at 
Ahmed Riza in the Senate without being called 
to order by the President. 

The Deputies are also, with even fewer ex- 
ceptions than the Senators — only one or two 
are reasonable men — all slaves pure and sim- 
ple of Enver and Talaat. The Lower House 
is nothing but a set of employees paid by the 
Clique. In other countries now at war the 
Lower House may have sunk to the level of a 
laughing-stock; in Turkey it has become the 
instrument of crime. And it is these same 
toadies and parasites, who daily carry out this 
military dictator's will in Parliament, that he 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 257 

daily treats with scarcely veiled irony and open 
and complete disdain. These are the "repre- 
sentatives of the people" in Turkey in war- 



258 TWO WAR YEARS 



CHAPTER X 

The outlook for the future — The consequences of trust- 
ing Germany — The Entente's death sentence on 
Turkey — The social necessity for this deliverance — 
Anatolia, the new Turkey after the war — Forecasts 
about the Turkish race — The Turkish element in 
the lost territory — Russia and Constantinople; in- 
ternational guarantees — Germany, at peace, benefits 
too — Farewell to the German "World-politicians" 
— German interests in a victorious and in an ampu- 
tated Turkey — The German-Turkish treaty — ^A par- 
adise on earth — The Russian commercial impetus 
— The new Armenia — Western Anatolia, the old 
Greek centre of civilisation — Great Arabia and 
Syria — The reconciliation of Germany. 

We have come to the end of our sketches. The 
question before us now is : What will become 
of Turkey? The Entente has pronounced for- 
mal sentence of death on the Empire of the 
Sultan, and neither the slowly fading military 
power of Turkey^ nor the help of Germany, 
who is herself already virtually conquered, will 
be able to arrest her fate. 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 259 

On the high frost-bound uplands of Ar- 
menia the Russians hold a strategic position 
from which it is impossible to dislodge them, 
and which will probably very soon extend to 
the Gulf of Alexandretta. In Mesopotamia, 
after that enormously important political 
event, the Fall of Baghdad, the union was ef- 
fected between the British troops and the Rus- 
sians, advancing steadily from Persia. The 
Suez Canal is now no longer threatened, and 
the British troops have been removed from 
there for a counter-offensive in Southern Pal- 
estine, and probably, when the psychological 
moment arrives, an off'ensive against Syria, 
now so sadly shattered politically. It is quite 
within the bounds of possibility, too, that dur- 
ing this war a big new Front may be formed 
in Western Anatolia, already completely 
broken up by the Pan-Hellenic Irredenta, and 
the Turks will be hard put to it to find troops 
to meet the new offensive. Arabia is finally and 
absolutely lost, and England, by establishing 
an Arabian Caliphate, has already won the 
war against Turkey. Meantime, on the far 
battlefields of Galicia and the Balkans, whole 
Ottoman divisions are pouring out their life- 



260 TWO WAR YEARS 

blood, fighting for that elusive German victory 
that never comes any nearer, while in every 
nook and corner of their own land there is a 
terrible lack of troops. Enver Pasha, at length 
grown anxious, has attempted to recall them, 
but in vain. 

That is a short resume of the military situa- 
tion. This is how the Turkey of Enver and 
Talaat is atoning for the trust she has placed 
in Germany. 

To a German journalist who went out two 
years ago to a great Turkey, striving for a 
"Greater Turkey," it does indeed seem a bit- 
ter irony of fate to see his sphere of labour thus 
reduced to nothingness. The fall of Turkey 
is the greatest blow that could have been dealt 
to German "world-politics"; it is a disappoint- 
ment that will have the gravest consequences. 
But from the standpoint of culture, human 
civilisation, ethics, the liberty of the peoples 
and justice, historical progress, the economic 
development of wide tracts of land of the 
greatest importance from their geographical 
position, it is one of the most brilliant results of 
the war, and one to be hailed with unmixed joy. 
When I look back on how wonderfully things 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 261 

have shaped in the last two and a half years I 
am bound to admit that I am happy things 
have turned out as they have. If perchance 
any Turk who knows me happens to read these 
lines, I beg him not to think that my ideas are 
saturated with hatred of Turkey. On the con- 
trary, I love the country and the Turkish race 
with those many attractive qualities that right- 
ly appealed to a j)oet like Loti. 

I have asked myself thousands of times what 
would be the best political solution of the prob- 
lem, how to help this people — and the other 
races inhabiting their country — to true and 
lasting happiness. From my many journeys 
in tropical lands, I have grown accustomed to 
the sight of autochthonous civilisations and 
semi-civilised peoples, and am as interested in 
them as in the most perfectly civilised nations 
of Europe. I have therefore, I think, been able 
to set aside entirely in my own mind the terri- 
torial interests of the West in the development 
of the Near East, and give my whole attention 
to Turkey's own good and Turkey's own needs. 
But even then I have been obliged to subscribe 
to the sentence of death passed on the Turkey 
of the Young Turks and the sovereignty of the 



262 TWO WAR YEARS 

Ottoman Empire. It is with the fullest con- 
sciousness of what I am doing that I agree to 
the only seemingly cruel amputation of this 
State. It is merely the outer shell covering a 
number of peoples who suffer cruelly under an 
unjust system, chief among them the brave 
Turkish people who have been led by a crim- 
inal Government to take the last step on the 
road to ruin. The point of view I have adopted 
does not in any way detract from my personal 
sympathies, and I still have hopes that the 
many personal friendships I made in Constan- 
tinople will not be broken by the hard words I 
have been obliged to utter in the cause of truth, 
in the interests of outraged civilisation, and in 
the interests of a happier future for the Otto- 
man people themselves. 

The amputation of Turkey is a stern social 
necessity. Someone has said: "The greatest 
enemy of Turkey is the Turk." I have too 
much love for the Turkish people, too much 
sympathy for them, to adopt this pessimistic 
attitude without great inward opposition; but 
unfortunately it is only too true. We have 
seen how the Turkey of Enver and Talaat has 
reacted sharply against the Western-minded, 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 263 

liberal era of the 1876 and 1908 constitutions, 
and has turned again to Asia and her newly 
discovered ideal, Turanism. To the Turks of 
to-day, European culture and civilisation are 
at best but a technical means; they are no 
longer an end in themselves. Their dream is 
no longer Western Europe, but a nationally 
awakened and strengthened Asiatentum. 

In face of this intellectual development, how 
can we hope that in the new Turkey there will 
be a radical alteration of what, in the whole 
course of Ottoman history, has always been the 
one characteristic, unchangeable, momentous 
fact, of what has always shattered the most 
honest efforts at reform, and always will shat- 
ter every attempt at improvement within a 
sovereign Turkey — I refer to the relationship 
of the Turk to the ''Rajah'' (the '^herd"), the 
Christian subjects of the Padishah. The Otto- 
man, the Mohammedan conqueror, lives by the 
"herd" he has found in the land he has con- 
quered; the "herd" are the "unbelievers," and 
rooted deep in the mind of this sovereign peo- 
ple, who have never quite lost their nomadic in- 
stincts, is the conviction that they have the right 
to live by the sweat of the brow of their Chris- 



264 TWO WAR YEARS 

tian subjects and on the fruits of their labour. 
That we Europeans think this unjust the Turk 
will never be able to grasp. 

A Wali of Erzerum once said : "The Turk- 
ish Government and the Armenian people 
stand in the relationship of man and wife, and 
any third persons who feel sympathy for the 
wife and anger at the wife-beating husband 
will do better not to meddle in this domestic 
strife." This quotation has become famous, 
for it exactly characterises the relationship of 
the Turk to the "Rajah," not to the Arme- 
nians. In this phrase alone there lies, quite 
apart from all the crimes committed by the 
present Turkish Government, a sufficient 
moral and political foundation for the sentence 
of death passed on the sovereignty of the pres- 
ent Turkish State. For so long as the Turks 
cling to Islam, from which springs that opj)osi- 
tion between Moslem rulers and "Giaur" sub- 
jects so detrimental to all social progress, it is 
Europe's sacred duty not to give Turkey sov« 
ereignty over any territory with a strong Chris- 
tian element. That is why Turkey must at all 
costs be confined to Inner Anatolia ; that hi why 
complete amputation is necessary ; and why the 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 265 

outlying districts of Turkey, the Straits, the 
Anatolian coast, the whole of Armenia must 
be rescued and, part of it at any rate, placed 
under formal European protection. 

Even in Inner Anatolia, which will probably 
still be left to the Ottomans after the war, the 
strongest European influence must be brought 
to bear — ^which will probably not be difficult in 
view of Turkey's financial bankruptcy; Euro- 
pean customs and civilisation must be intro- 
duced; in a word, Europe must exercise suffi- 
cient control to be in a position to prevent the 
numerous non-Turks resident even in Ana- 
tolia from being exposed to the old system of 
exploiting the ''Rajah." Discerning Turks 
themselves have admitted that it would be best 
for Europe to put the whole of Turkey for a 
generation under curatorship and general Eu- 
ropean supervision. 

I, personally, should not be satisfied with 
this system for the districts occupied more by 
non-Turks than by Turks; but, on the other 
hand, I should not go so far in the case of Inner 
Anatolia. I trust that strong European in- 
fluence will make it possible to make Inner 
Anatolia a sovereign territory. I have pinned 



266 TWO WAR YEARS 

my faith on the Ottoman race being given an- 
other and final opportunity on her own ground 
of showing how she will develop now after the 
wonderful intellectual improvement that has 
taken place during the war. I hope at the 
same time that even in a sovereign Turkish 
Inner Anatolia Europe will have enough say 
to prevent any out-growths of the "Rajah 
principle." 

The Turks must not be deprived of the op- 
portunity to bring their new-found abilities, 
which even we must praise, to bear on the pro- 
duction of a new, modern, but thoroughly 
Turkish civilisation of their own on their own 
ground. Anatolia, beautiful and capable of 
development, is, even if we confine it to those 
interior parts chiefly inhabited by Ottomans, 
still quite a big enough field for the produc- 
tion of such a civilisation; it is quite big enough 
too for the terribly reduced numbers now be- 
longing to the Osmanic race. 

The amputation and limitation of Turkey, 
even if they do not succeed in altering the real 
Turkish point of view — and this, so far as the 
relationship to the Christians is concerned, is 
the same, from the Pasha down to the poorest 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 267 

Anatolian peasant — will at least have a tre- 
mendously beneficial effect. The possibilities 
in the Turkish race will come to flower. "The 
worst patriots," I once dared to say in "one of 
my articles in sjjite of the censorship, "are not 
those who look for the future of the nation 
in concentrated cultural work in the Turkish 
nucleus-land of Anatolia, instead of gaping 
over the Caucasus and down into the sands of 
the African desert in their search for a 'Greater 
Turkey.' " And in connection with the series 
of lectures I have already mentioned about 
Anatolian hygiene and social politics, I said, 
with quite unmistakable meaning: "Turkey 
will have a wonderful opportunity on her own 
original ground, in the nucleus-land of the 
Ottomans, of proving her capability and show- 
ing that she has become a really modern, civil- 
ised State." 

My earnest wish is that all the Turks' high 
intellectual abilities, brought to the front by 
this war, may be concentrated on this beau- 
tiful and repaying task. Intensive labour and 
the concentration of all forces on positive work 
in the direction of civilisation will have to take 
the place of corrupt rule, boundless neglect, 



268 TWO WAR YEARS 

waste, the strangulation of all progressive 
movements, political illusions, the unquench- 
able desire for conquest and oppression. This 
is what we pray for for Anatolia, the real New 
Turkey after the war. In other districts, also, 
now fully under European control, the pure 
Turkish element will flourish much more ex- 
ceedingly than ever before under the beneficent 
protection of modern, civilised Governments. 
Frankly, the dream of Turkish Power has van- 
ished. But new life springs out of ruin and 
decay; the history of mankind is a continual 
change. 

Russia, too, after war, will no longer be 
what she seemed to terrified Turkish eyes and 
jealous German eyes dazzled by "world-poli- 
tics": a colossal creature, stretching forth 
enormous suckers to swallow up her smaller 
neighbours ; a country ruled by a dull, unthink- 
ing despotism. 

From the standpoint of universal civilisa- 
tion it is to be hoped that the solution of the 
problem of the Near East will be to trans- 
form the Straits between the Black Sea and 
Aegea, together with the city of Constanti- 
nople, uniquely situated as it is, into a com- 



IlSr CONSTANTINOPLE 269 

pletely international stretch with open har- 
bours. Then we need no longer oppose Rus- 
sian aspirations. If England, the stronghold 
of Free Trade and of all principles of freedom 
of intercourse, and France, the land of culture, 
interested in Turkey to the extent of millions, 
were content to leave Russia a free hand in 
the Straits ; if Roimaania, shut in in the Black 
Sea, did not fear for her trade, but was willing 
to become an ally of Russia in full knowledge 
of the Entente agreement about the Straits, it 
is of course sufficiently evident what guarantee 
with regard to international freedom modern 
Russia will have to give after the war, and 
even the Germans have nothing to fear. Of 
course the German anti-European ''Antwerp- 
Baghdad" dream will be shattered. But once 
Germany is at peace, she will probably find 
that even the Russian solution of the Straits 
question benefits her not a little. The final 
realisation of Russia's efforts, justifiable both 
historically and geographically, to reach the 
Mediterranean at this one eminently suitable 
spot, will certainly contribute in an extraordi- 
nary degree to remove the unbearable politi- 



270 TWO WAR YEARS 

cal pressure from Europe and ensure peace for 
the world. 

Just a few parting words to the German 
"World-pohtieians." Very often, as I have 
said, I heard during my stay in Constanti- 
nople expressions of anxiety on the part of 
Germans that all German interests, even pure- 
ly commercial ones, would be gravely endan- 
gered in the victorious New Turkey, which 
would spring to life again with renewed jingo- 
istic passions and renewed efforts at emanci- 
pation. And more than once — all honour to 
the feelings of justice and the sound common 
sense of those who dared to utter such opin- 
ions — I was told by Germans, in the middle of 
the war, and with no attempt at concealment, 
that they fully agreed it was an absolute neces- 
sity for Russia to have the control of the only 
outlet for her enormous trade to the Mediter- 
ranean, and that commercially at any rate the 
fight for Constantinople and the Straits was 
a fight for a just cause. 

Now, let us take these two points of view 
together. From the purely German stand- 
point, which is better? — a victorious and self- 
governing Turkey imbued with jingoism and 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 271 

the desire for emancipation, practically closed 
to us, even commercially, or an amputated 
Turkey, compelled to appeal for European 
help and European capital to recover from her 
state of complete exhaustion; a Turkey freed 
from those Young Turkish jingoists who, in 
spite of all their fine phrases and the German 
help they had to accept for all their inward 
distaste of it, hate us from the very depths of 
their heart; a Turkey which, even if Russia, 
— as a last resort! — is allowed to become mis- 
tress of the Dardanelles with huge interna- 
tional guarantees, would, in the Anatolia that 
is left to her, capable of development as it is, 
and rich in national wealth, offer a very con- 
siderable field of activity for German enter- 
prise? The short-sighted Pan-Germans, who 
are now fighting for the victory of anti-foreign 
neo-Pan-Turkism against the modern, civilised 
States of the Entente, who had no wish at all 
that Germany should not fare as well as the 
rest in the wide domains of Asiatic Turkey, 
can perhaps answer my question. They 
should have asked themselves this, and fore- 
seen the consequences before they yielded 



272 TWO WAR YEARS 

weakly to Turkish caprices and themselves 
stirred up the Turks against Eurape. 

As things stand now, however, the German 
Government has thought fit, in her blind be- 
lief in ultimate victory, to enter on a formal 
treaty, guaranteeing the territorial integrity 
of the Ottoman Empire, at a point in the war 
when no reasonable being even in Germany 
could possibly still believe that a German vic- 
tory would suffice to protect Turkey after she 
has been solemnly condemned by the Entente 
for her long list of crimes. Germany has thus 
given a negative answer to the question passed 
from mouth to mouth in the international dis- 
trict of Pera almost right from Turkey's entry 
into the war: "Will Germany, if necessary, 
sacrifice Constantinople and the Dardanelles, 
if she can thus secure peace with Russia?" She 
had already given the answer "No" before the 
absurd illusions of a possible separate peace 
with Russia at this price were finally and ut- 
terly dispelled by the speech of the Russian 
Minister Trepoif, and the purposeful and 
cruelly clear refusal of Germany's offer of 
peace. These events and the increasing ex- 
citement about the war in Constantinople and 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 273 

elsewhere were not required to show that in 
the Near East as well the fight must be fought 
"to the bitter end." 

Never, however — and that is German 
World-politics, and the ethics of the World- 
pohtician — ^have I ever heard a single one of 
those Germans, who thought it an impossibil- 
ity to sacrifice their ally Turkey in order to 
gain the desired peace, put forward as an ar- 
gument for his opinion the shame of a broken 
promise, but only the consideration that Ger- 
man activity in the lands of Islam, and par- 
ticularly in the valuable Near East, would be 
over and done with for ever. I wonder if 
those who have decided, with the phantom of 
a German-Turkish victory ever before them, 
to go on with the struggle on the side of Tur- 
key even after she had committed such abom- 
inable crimes, and to drench Europe still 
further with the blood of all the civilised na- 
tions of the world, ever have any qualms as 
to how much of their once brilliant possibil- 
ities of commercial activity in Turkey, now 
so lightly staked, would still exist were Tur- 
key victorious. 

Luckily for mankind, history has decided 



274 TWO WAR YEARS 

otherwise. After the war, the huge and flour- 
ishing trade of Southern Russia will be car- 
ried down to the then open seaports between 
Europe and Asia; the wealth of Odessa and 
the Pontus ports, enormously increased and 
free to develop, will be concentrated on the 
Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and the whole 
hitherto neglected city of Constantinople, from 
Pera and Galata to Stamboul and Scutari and 
Haidar-Pasha, will become an earthly para- 
dise of pulsing life, well-being, and comfort. 
The luxury and elegance of the Crimea will 
move southwards to these shores of unique nat- 
ural beauty and mild climate which form the 
bridge between two continents and between 
two seas. Anyone who returns after a decade 
of peaceful labour, when the Old World has 
recovered from its wounds, to the Bosporus 
and the shores of the Sea of Marmora, which 
he knew before the war, under Turkish regime, 
will be astonished at the marvellous changes 
which will then have been wrought in that fa- 
voured corner of the earth. 

Never, even after another hundred years 
of Turkish rule, would that unique coast ever 
have become what it can be and what it must 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 275 

be — one of the very greatest centres of inter- 
national intercourse and the Riviera of the 
East, not only in beauty of landscape, but in 
luxury and wealth. The greatest stress in 
this connection is to be laid on the lively Rus- 
sian impetus that will spring from a modern- 
ised Russia, untrammelled by restrictions in 
the Straits. Convinced as I am that Russia 
after the war will no longer be the Russia of 
to-day, so feared by Germany, the Balkan 
States, and Turkey, I am prepared to give this 
impetus full play, as being the best possible 
means for the further development of Constan- 
tinople. 

In Asia Minor, from Brussa to the slopes of 
the Taurus and the foot of the Armenian 
mountains, there will extend a modern Turkey 
which has finally come to rest, to concentra- 
tion, to peaceful labour, after centuries of con- 
flict, despotic extortion, the suicidal policy of 
military adventurers, and superficial attempts 
at expansion coupled with neglect of the most 
important internal duties. The inhabitants of 
these lands will soon have forgotten that 
"Greater Turkey" has collapsed. They will 
be really happy at last, these people whose 



276 TWO WAR YEARS 

idea of happiness hitherto had been a veneer of 
material well-being obtained by toadying, 
while the great bulk of the Empire pined in 
dirt, ignorance, and poverty, consimied by an 
outworn militarism, oppressed by a decaying 
administration. Then, but not till then, the 
world will see what the Turkish people is ca- 
pable of. Then there will be no need for pes- 
simism about this kindly and honourable race. 
Then we can become honest "Pro-Turks" 
again. 

In Western Asia Minor, Europe will not 
forget that the whole shore, where once stood 
Troy, Ephesus, and Milet, is an out-and-out 
Hellenic centre of civilisation. Quite indepen- 
dently of all political feelings towards pres- 
ent-day Greece, this historical fact must be 
taken into consideration in the final ruling. It 
is to be hoped that the Greek people will not 
have to atone for ever for the faults of their 
non-Greek king who has forgotten that it is 
his sacred duty to be a Greek and nothing but 
a Greek, and who has betrayed the honour 
and the future of the nation. 

The Armenian mountain-land, laid waste by 
war, and emptied of men by Talaat's passion 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 277 

for persecution, will obtain autonomy from her 
conqueror, Russia, and will perhaps be linked 
up with all the other parts of the east, in- 
habited by the last remnants of the Armenian 
people. Armenia, with its central position and 
divided into three among Turkey, Russia, and 
Persia, may from its geographical position, its 
unfortunate history, and the endless sufferings 
it has been called upon to bear, be called the 
Poland of Further Asia. Delivered from the 
Turkish system, freed from all antagonistic 
Turko-Russian military principles of obstruc- 
tion, linked up by railways to the west as well 
as the already well-developed region of Trans- 
caucasia, with a big through trade from the 
Black Sea via Trapezunt to Persia and Meso- 
potamia, it will once more offer an excellent 
field of activity to the high intellectual and 
commercial abilities of its people, now, alas! 
scattered to the four winds of heaven. But 
they will return to their old home, bringing 
with them European ideas, European tech- 
nique, and the most modern methods from 
America. 

If men are lacking, they can be obtained 
from the near Caucasus with its narrow, over- 



278 TWO WAR YEARS 

filled valleys, inhabited by a most superior 
race of men, who have always had strong emi- 
grating instincts. Even this most unfortunate 
country in the whole world, which the Turks 
of the Old Regime and of the New have sys- 
tematically mutilated and at last bequeathed to 
Russia with practically not a man left, is going 
to have its spring-time. 

In the south. Great Arabia and Syria will 
have autonomy under the protection of Eng- 
land and France with their skilful Islam pol- 
icy; they will have the benefit of the approved 
methods of progressive work in Egypt, the 
Soudan, and India as well as the Atlas lands; 
they will be exposed to the influences and in- 
citements of the rest of civilised Europe; they 
will probably be enriched with capital from 
America, where thousands of Arab and Syrian, 
as well as Armenian, refugees have found a 
home ; they will provide the first opportunity in 
history of showing how the Arab race accom- 
modates itself to modern civilisation on its own 
ground and with its own sovereign administra- 
tion. The final deliverance of the Arabs from 
the oppressive and harmful supremacy of the 
Turks, now happily accomplished by the war, 



IN CONSTANTINOPLE 279 

was one of the most urgent demands for a race 
that can look back on centuries of brilhant civi- 
lisation. The civilised world will watch with 
the keenest interest the self-development of the 
Arabian lands. 

Even Germany, once she is at peace, will 
have no need to grumble at these arrange- 
ments, however diametrically opposed they 
may be to the now sadly shattered plans of 
the Pan-German and Expansion politicians. 
Germany will not lose the countless millions 
she has invested in Turkey. She will have her 
full and sufficient share in the European work 
and commercial activity that will soon revive 
again in the Near East. The Baghdad rail- 
way of "Rohrbach & Company" will never be 
built, it is true; but the Baghdad Railway with 
a loyal international marking off of the dif- 
ferent zones of interest, the Baghdad Railway, 
as a huge artery of peaceful intercourse link- 
ing up the whole of Asia Minor and bringing 
peace and commercial prosperity, will all the 
more surely rise from its ruins. And when 
once the German Weltpolitik with its jealousy, 
its tactless, sword-rattling interference in the 
time-honoured vital interests of other States, 



280 TWO WAR YEARS 

its political intrigues disguised in commercial 
dress, is safely dead and buried, there will be 
nothing whatever to hinder Germany from 
making use of this railway and carrying her 
purely commercial energy and the products of 
her peaceful labour to the shores of the Per- 
sian Gulf and receiving in return the rich fruits 
of her cultural activity on the soil of Asia Mi- 
nor. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 

Foe the better understanding of the fact that 
a German journalist, the representative of a 
great national paper like the Kolnische Zei- 
tung, could publish such a book as this, and to 
ward off in advance all the furious personal 
attacks which will result from its publication, 
and which might, without an explanation, in- 
juriously affect its value as an independent 
and uninfluenced document, it is, I think, es- 
sential to explain the role I filled in Constanti- 
nople, how I left Turkey, and how I came to 
the decision to publish my experiences. 

As far as my post on the Kolnische Zeitimg 
is concerned, I accepted it and went to Turkey 
although I was from the very beginning 
against German "World-politics" of the pres- 
ent-day style at any rate (not against German 
commercial and cultural activity in foreign 
countries) and against militarism — as was only 
to be expected from one who had studied colo- 
nial poUtics and universal history unreserved- 

283 



284 APPENDIX 

ly, and had spent many years studying in the 
English, French, and German colonies of 
Africa — and although I was quite convinced 
that Germany's was the crime of setting the 
war in motion. Besides, my "anti-militarism" 
is not of a dogmatic kind, but refers merely to 
the relations customary between civilised na- 
tions — witness the fact that I took part in the 
Colonial War of 1904-6 in German South- 
West Africa as a volunteer. 

I hoped to find in Turkey some satisfaction 
for my extra-European leanings, a sphere of 
labour less absorbed by German militarism, 
and opportunity for independent study, and 
surely no one will take it amiss that I seized 
such a chance, certainly unique in war-time, in 
spite of my political views. 

Once arrived in Turkey, I kept well in the 
background to begin with, so as to be able to 
form my own opinion, of course doing my ut- 
termost at the same time to be loyal to the task 
I had undertaken. In spite of everything I 
had to witness, it was quite easy to reconcile 
all oppositions, until that famous day when 
my wife denounced Germany to my face. 
From that moment I became an enemy of pres- 



APPENDIX 285 

ent-day Germany and began to think of one 
day publishing the whole truth about the sys- 
tem. Until then I had contented myself with 
never saying a good word about the war, as 
one can easily find for oneself from a perusal 
of my various articles in the Kolnische Zeitung 
during 1915-16, dated from Constantinople 
and marked (a small steamship ) . 

That dramatic event which finally alienated 
me from the German cause took place just 
after the end of a severe crisis in my relation- 
ship with German-Turkish Headquarters. 
Some slight hints I had given of Turkish mis- 
management, cynicism, and jingoism in a se- 
ries of articles appearing from February 15th,* 
1916, onwards, under the title '^Turkish Eco- 
nomic Problems," so far as they were possible 
under existing censorship conditions, was the 
occasion of the trouble. One can imagine that 
Headquarters would certainly be furious with 
a journalist whose articles appeared one fine 
day, literally translated, in the Matin under 
the title: ''Situation insupportable en Tur- 
quie, decrite par un journalist e allemand" 
("Insufferable situation in Turkey, described 
by a German journalist"), and cropped up 



286 APPENDIX 

once more on June 1st, in the Journal des Bal- 
cans, I was three times over threatened with 
dismissal. My paper sent a confidential man 
to hold an inquiry, and after a month he made 
a confidential report, which resulted in my be- 
ing allowed to remain. But the fact that the 
same journalist that wrote such things was 
married to a Czech was too much for my col- 
leagues, who were in part in the pay of the 
Embassy, in part in the pay of the Young 
Turkish Committee, whose politics they 
praised, regardless of their own inward convic- 
tions, like the representative of the Berliner 
Tagehlatt, to get material benefit or make sure 
of their own jobs. I gleaned many humorous 
details at a nightly sitting of my Press col- 
leagues in Pera, at which I myself was branded 
as a "dangerous character that must be got rid 
of," and my wife (who was far too young ever 
to worry about politics) as a "Russian spy" — 
perhaps because, with the justifiable pride and 
reserve of her race, she did not attempt to culti- 
vate the society of the German colony. That 
began the period of intrigues and ill-will, but 
my enemies did not succeed in damaging me, 
although matters went so far as a denunciation 



APPENDIX 287 

of me before the "Prevention of Espionage 
Department" of the General Staff in Berlin. 
My paper, after they had given me the fullest 
moral satisfaction, and had arranged for me 
to remain in Constantinople in spite of all that 
had taken place, thought it was better to give 
me the chance of changing and offered me a 
new post on the editorial staff elsewhere. 

However, I was now quite finished with Ger- 
many, or rather with its politics ; it would have 
been a moral impossibility for me to write an- 
other single word in the editorial line ; so I re- 
fused the offer and applied for sick-leave from 
October 1st, 1916, to the end of the war (by 
telegram about the middle of August). It 
was granted me with an expression of regret. 

Arrived in Switzerland (February 7th, 
1917), I severed all connection with my paper 
by mutual consent from October 1st, 1916, on- 
wards. After my resignation, no special edi- 
torial representative of the Kolnische Zeitung 
was appointed to take my place, as the censor- 
ship made any kind of satisfactory work im- 
possible. 

I should like to emphasise the fact that the 
intrigues against me, the crisis with Head- 



288 APPENDIX 

quarters I have just mentioned, and my de- 
parture from Constantinople did not injure me 
in any way either morally or financially, and 
have nothing whatever to do with the present 
publication. It is certainly not any petty an- 
noyance that could bring me to such an action, 
which will probably entail more than enough 
unpleasant consequences for me. The re- 
proaches levelled against me by my pushing, 
jingoistic colleagues were as impotent as their 
attempts to get rid of me as "dangerous to the 
German Cause" ; I have written proof of this 
from my paper in my hand, and also of the 
fact that it was of my own free-will that I re- 
tired. I can therefore look forward quite 
calmly to all the personal invective that is sure 
to be showered on me for political reasons. 

I had sufficient independent means not to 
feel the loss of my post in Constantinople too 
keenly; and if I still kept my post after the 
beginning of the crisis with Headquarters, it 
was simply and solely so that as a newspaper 
correspondent I might be in possession of 
fuller information, and able to follow up as 
long as possible the developments that were 
taking place on that most interesting soil of 



APPENDIX 289 

Turkey. When that was no longer possible, I 
refused the post offered me in Cologne— in 
fact twice, once by letter and once by tele- 
gram—for I could not pretend to opinions I 
directly opposed. I therefore remained as a 
free-lance in the Turkish capital. I was ex- 
tremely glad that the difference of opinion 
ended as it did, for I had at last a free hand to 
say and write what I thought and felt. 

My stay in Constantinople for a further 
three months as a silent observer naturally did 
not escape the notice of the German authori- 
ties, and after they had reported to the Foreign 
Office that a ^'satisfactory co-operation be- 
tween me and the German representatives was 
not longer possible," they had of course to dis- 
cover some excuse for putting an end to my 
prolonged stay in Turkey. They finally at- 
tempted to get rid of me by calling me up for 
military duty again. But this was useless in 
my case, for my health had been badly shaken 
by my spell at the Front at the beginning of 
the war, and besides I had the doctor's word 
for it that I should never be able to stand the 
German climate after having lived so long in 
the Tropics. 



290 APPENDIX 

Whether they liked it or not, the authorities 
had to find some other means of getting me out 
of Constantinople. The Consul-General ap- 
proached me, after he had discussed the matter 
with the Ambassador, to see if I would not like 
to go to Switzerland to get properly cured; 
otherwise he was sure I would be turned out 
by the Turks. They were evidently afraid, for 
I was getting more and more into bad odour 
with the German authorities for my ill-con- 
cealed opinions, that I would publish my im- 
pressions, with documentary support, as soon 
as ever there was a change of government in 
Turkey, or as soon as the German censorship 
was removed and anything of the kind was pos- 
sible. They apparently thought that the fron- 
tier regulations would be quite sufficient to pre- 
vent my taking any documentary evidence with 
me to Switzerland. 

As a matter of fact this was the case, and the 
day before my departure from Constantinople 
I carefully burned the whole of my many 
notes, which would have produced a much more 
effective indictment against the moral sordid- 
ness of the German- Young Turkish system 
than these very general sketches. But the 



APPENDIX 291 

strictest frontier regulations could not prevent 
me from taking with me, free of all censor- 
ship, the impressions I had received in Turkey, 
and the opinions I had arrived at after a pain- 
ful battle for loyalty to myself as a German 
and to the duties I had undertaken. Even 
then I had considerable difficulty in getting 
across the frontier, and I had to wait seventeen 
whole days at the frontier before I was finally 
allowed into Switzerland. It was only owing 
to the fact that I sent a telegram to the Chan- 
cellor, on the authority of the Consul- General 
in Constantinople, begging that no difficulties 
of a political kind might be placed in the way 
of my going to Switzerland, as I had been per- 
mitted to do so by medical certificate, the pass- 
port authorities and the local command, that 
I finally won my point with the frontier au- 
thorities and was permitted to cross into Swit- 
zerland. 

To tell the truth, I must admit that the high 
civil authorities, and particularly the Foreign 
Office, treated me throughout most kindly and 
courteously. For this one reason I had a hard 
fight with myself, right up to the very last, 
even after I arrived in Switzerland, before I 



292 APPENDIX 

sat down and wrote out my impressions and 
opinions of German-Turkish politics. And if 
I have now finally decided to make them pub- 
lie, I can only do so with an expression of the 
most honest regret that my private and politi- 
cal conscience has not allowed me to requite the 
kindness of the authorities by keeping silent 
about what I saw of the German and Turkish 
system. 



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